Jack Trolove’s practice, spans 20 years of working with the body, as political site and poetic substance.
For many years he created articulate work using moving image, performance and collective practice, but he’s clearly found his home in painting which he refers to as his ‘first love’.
While the social and theoretical influences in Trolove’s work have long been weighty (inter generational trauma and healing, queer-trans feminisms, de-colonisation and critical whiteness studies) these days his work looks, and lands, more like poetry than politics.
His works catch the viewer, initially engaging them at a sensory level. Poetry works because it opens spaces for ones own knowing to emerge.
Good poetry does not fix a truth, dogmatically telling you a thing as political rhetoric does.
Trolove’s visual poetry opens the reader to their own rhythm.
"The paintings pull me into my own story - opening my pores so I can hear what has been silent. They remind me I’m more than my flesh."Jack Trolove
It goes without saying he’s a brilliant, generous painter. His new works lunge between beautiful, unsettling and uplifting. Ultimately, I’ve decided they’re about friction.
They are materially, like the politics of the artist, layers dragged together, which revel in the agency of showing themselves ‘being made’. Layers which reveal the vibrant life between us.