Haunted House

Painter John Paul Jones has a mind like a haunted house--and a house of marvels it is. In it, people of all shapes from heaven knows what time or place materialize in room after room. In his current one-man show at Los Angeles' Felix Landau Gallery (see color), he has heads and figures that seem to hover indecisively between existence and nonexistence. His sculptured heads achieve somewhat the same feeling by looking as if they had been buried for a while and had then decided to rejoin the world. Jones, who is an associate professor of art at U.C.L.A., seems to see reality as a pattern of becomings and perishings but he emphasizes the becomings. As he views his figures, they are perpetually emerging from the ghostly spaces behind.

There is no conscious philosophy behind all this any more than there was a philosophy behind the meticulous geometric abstractions that Jones once did. He abandoned the abstractions because he felt that he was "putting too much emphasis on organization. I could do the best rectangle in the country, but it was too sterile, too intellectual." In concentrating on the figure, Jones is not taking sides in what he regards as the wholly irrelevant debate between representation and abstraction. He is simply after a "personal statement" that lets him "operate with the intellect and the emotions as well.''

Most of Jones's paintings tend to be dark, but not because of any preoccupation with death. He describes his own act of painting as "a kind of fidgeting to make the figure emerge. I put in, I wipe out, I put back in. I change the shape of the shoulders, move the nose up and down." Jones's esthetic instinct is satisfied only after he has achieved the ectopasmic ambiguity that is his hallmark. "The figure is woven into the fabric of the surface," he explains. "The figures are hinged onto this darkness the way people are hinged onto life."

None of the figures is meant to be any particular person. Jones sees his echoing monochrome backgrounds as crowded with people all waiting to be pulled out. "I don't know how many figures are standing there waiting. If the face I first find should disappear, there would be many others to take up the emptiness." Jones does not pretend to have a message about suffering humanity; yet his figures do seem laden with fateful secrets they stubbornly refuse to tell. "People are very mysterious." says Jones quite simply, and in his painting the mystery is there in full.

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