In John Paul Kesling’s show, Lean-To, currently on display at Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment in Huntsville, the artist creates paintings that are greater than the sum of their parts. Like the namesake structure, Kesling’s works bring new life to abandoned items, creating something new, both in subject and material.
Kesling distorts and disarticulates the human body to a moving effect in many of his pieces. In How to Boil Water (2024), a mustard yellow man drawn in charcoal is contorted into an unnatural shape at the bottom of the painting. Behind him, a peach background hints at a sunset scene.
As hinted in the title of the show, Lean-To, Kesling finds new purposes for existing materials. In Lover, You Should Have Come Over (2024), Kesling embeds a Jose Canseco baseball card into the painting of a human figure cradling a baby. A row of eyes flank the left side of the frame. He uses dulled and blended colors of cream, olive green, and gray to create a grim atmosphere, in contradiction to most of his other works shown, which include a deluge of bright oranges, pinks, and purples.
In Well, Shit. I’m Dead (2023), Kesling uses a canvas of cardboard to depict a person, upside down on all fours trying to break free from a burial. On top of the corpse is a simple cross, and if taking the title literally, speaks to a recent awareness of their death. The entire scene includes a turquoise body of water and a lavender sky punctuated by both a shining sun and full moon. Throughout, the brown ridges of the cardboard peak through the paint, bringing the viewer back down to Earth, just like the buried figure.
The two recurring motifs of found materials and broken bodies meet in Hope for a Home (2024), where a yellow-haired and goateed, disembodied head rests on top of two rows of hardware store paint swatches. On the bottom row of paint swatches, loose eyeballs return a glance back at the viewer.
The show, which includes more than fifteen paintings, takes viewers into a dream world where Kesling encourages contemplating what hidden purposes or meanings the people, materials, and thoughts around one can reveal.
