Jim Jarmusch — James Fuentes Gallery, Los Angeles
The cineast, poet and artist Jim Jarmusch reveals a more intimate and lesser-known side of his art through an exhibition in Los Angeles at James Fuentes Gallery where he presents a series of collages, continuing a project he began decades ago in the privacy of his studio. This discreet yet magnetic practice offers an unprecedented reflection on his cinematic work.
It was only in 2021, during a first exhibition at James Fuentes in New York, that the public discovered this aspect of his work, where disparate elements come together to exist outside the confines of time and space. In his recent works presented in some more collages, Jarmusch focuses on a staging of obliteration, blurring the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the familiar and the uncanny through simple and spontaneous gestures.
From the contemplative atmospheric landscapes of his films to the minimal, rough-edged cutouts of these collages headless silhouettes on a black background, a thread of strangeness and suspension seems to connect his practices. The images he has long collected, much like the landscapes he captures, take on a new form of reality, where life, almost spectral, exists without words or faces.
« My process of creating things is very similar, » he states in the exhibition text, taken from an interview with The New York Times, « whether I’m writing a script or shooting a film or making a piece of music or writing a poem or making a collage. I gather the elements from which I will make the thing first. The collages reduce it to the most minimal form of that procedure. »
Through absence, Jarmusch carves pathways in the image to let the imagination escape, offering a collection of compositions where the violence of depersonalization gradually gives way to a poetics of suspension. Anonymous bodies, figures from iconic works of art history, and historical subjects are all treated as equals, delicately stripped of their faces sometimes even their arms to float in the limbo of a shared mental landscape.
Free in his approach, he alternates between cutting and collaging, reassembling and patching together frames whose edges he systematically tears apart. Once again in suspension, the corners of his images are never borders nor endpoints. Much like the apparent antonyms in many of his film titles (Dead Man, Ghost Dog, Broken Flowers, Permanent Vacation) contrasts and opposites bend and adapt, never fully resolving; wounded, yet never vanished.
Jim Jarmusch, some more collages, March 29 — April 26, 2025 James Fuentes LLC Gallery, 5015 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles
Discover some of the exhibited works:
