Enoki II 2013

James Jean's 'Enoki II' must have come into being through a kind of intuitive layering, building up these delicate washes of colour. I can imagine Jean, brush in hand, coaxing these strange botanical forms out of the surface. What a space he creates! It's like stepping into a dream, everything glows with a sort of underwater luminescence, a mix of blues, greens, and ghostly whites. There's a figure in there too, wrapped in bandages, with a flashlight—maybe she's on some kind of nocturnal quest. And those lines, so precise, almost etched into the painting, they remind me of the graphic sensibilities of someone like Yoshitaka Amano, but with a distinctly contemporary twist. It makes you wonder about the conversations artists are having across time, about the different ways of conjuring up a world, one brushstroke at a time. It's all just paint, but it’s also a feeling, an idea, a world in the making.