With Paper Boy, H.D Galerie dedicates a solo exhibition to JonOne and chooses to look at a particular dimension of his work: paper.
The exhibition exclusively gathers unique works, conceived as fragments of a moving writing. On paper, JonOne's gesture appears in its most immediate form: fast, instinctive, physical. Color overlaps, lines cross, signs accumulate until they make the boundary between writing and abstraction disappear.
Before the canvas, before the institutions and international exhibitions, there is in JonOne this necessity to leave a trace.
Born in New York and emerging from graffiti culture, the artist has been building an immediately recognizable language since the 1980s. His name, repeated until saturation, progressively freed from its primary function, becomes material. The letters are no longer only meant to be read: they become rhythm, movement, and color.
In Paper Boy, this energy meets a more intimate support.
Paper imposes another relationship to the gesture. It retains the accident, the speed, the repetitions, and the hesitations. It absorbs the color and keeps the memory of each intervention. Where monumentality can sometimes impose a distance, paper brings things closer. It allows one to enter into the very construction of the work and to rediscover something almost original in JonOne's practice.
The title Paper Boy plays precisely with this idea of a return to fundamentals. Not a step back, but a way of looking otherwise at a practice developed over more than four decades: to rediscover the spontaneity of the line, the urgency to create, and that freedom which remains at the heart of his work.
Through this selection of unique works, H.D Galerie wishes to show a JonOne that is both immediately identifiable and more intimate. Behind the chromatic explosion appears the obsessive repetition of the gesture; behind the energy, a writing; behind the name turned symbol, the artist's hand.
Paper Boy is an exhibition about paper, but above all about the trace: the one that is repeated, that is transformed, and that is left behind.
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