DFN Gallery is pleased to present Jean-Pierre Roy’s cinematic and richly-detailed imagined landscapes in oil on panel.  Like the landscapes of the Hudson River School, Roy’s works succeed in conveying the sublime in its original, Burkean sense, as man’s aesthetic response to the awe-inspiring forces of nature.  The presence of humanity and its works in Roy’s scenes is dwarfed, insignificant; the natural world is overwhelming in its vastness.   

Roy mitigates this overpowering effect, and adds a dimension of softer melancholy to the works, by employing invented scenes, a distant perspective, and small scale.   Entering the realms Roy depicts in such meticulous detail provides us with a way of examining the complex, contemporary relationship between man and his surroundings. As the artist says, “In exploring the sublime I wanted to invent landscapes that held, somewhere within their bird’s-eye perspectives, a collision between the infinite and the man-made. For me, there exists a quiet mourning in this encounter that speaks directly to the nature of the human experience.” 

Each image is a glimpse into a fully-imagined world, a setting for events that the viewer is moved to envision.  The influence of the artist’s work as a matte painter for film and video game backgrounds is reflected in these paintings, not least in their unlikely pairing of utterly authentic geographical detail with a soaring sense of fantasy and unreality.  “Invention has always been a necessary part of my image-making process,” says Roy.  “My pursuit of representation is not so much driven by my desire to depict the real world, but to clearly document the spaces I’ve only visited in my head.”  By creating an ambiguous narrative framework, he invites the viewer to invest the paintings with their own fears and fantasies, allowing for new psychological tensions to evolve with each level of investigation.

Roy was born in Santa Monica, California.  He received a BFA from Loyola Marymount University and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art.  As an illustrator, his clients have included Electronic Arts, Ziff Davis Media, Veuve Cliquot, and Heidi Klum, Inc. This is his first exhibition at DFN, and his first solo show in New York.