I love a painting that is incredibly striking, to the point where you can basically not look away. I have to say when I stumbled across a Jonas Burgert's painting that is exactly what happened. His dramatic use of vivid neon colors is striking and the monumental scale of the situations he presents is quite amazing. Born and working in Germany, Burgert exhibits his massive wall sized paintings all around the world.
The sheer amount of information, emotion, color and action is very overwhelming at first. The intricate narratives portrayed are both complex in visuals and in meaning. While generally I'm not one for bleak disturbing art I really do enjoy his work. There's work out there with similar content, but I've never seen anyone that has a style quite like his. Each image to me is like a still from a film scene; they truly do seem alive, but the bizarre use of scale and color keep them from portraying too realistic of a scenario. The last image of the crowd and the toxic waste is especially intriguing i think because of the unconventional cluttered composition. There is a true sense of chaos as your eye moves from character to character trying to piece together the situation that is unfolding in front of you. While the topic is very straight forward and in your face, something about the striking visuals allows me to be ok with the sort of punchline topic of the decline of civilization.
Burgert's work is a textbook example of work that is best viewed in person. It reminds me of a Picasso piece that is in the MOMA, where you really cannot appreciate the work in full until it is viewed up close in full scale in person.
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