Jonathan Lasker. Pictures for Happy Existentialists

In his London space, Timothy Taylor presents thirteen works (including four drawings) by Jonathan Lasker (USA, b. 1948) created between 1990 and 2025. The humour in the titles counterbalances the great precision of the style and the enduring principle: painting painting. The iconoclastic irony is subtle, always kept under control by the time invested in the making and 2025 the demanding treatment of the pictorial material. The viewer’s interpretation is at the heart of the play; many of the works organise elements that cut across each other to the point of incompatibility, reinforced by the recurring use of oxymoron in the titles. The shapeless silhouettes in the foreground of Contract Between Picture & Viewer (2024), which one finds oneself almost regarding as viewers, also produce a discordance. In two other paintings, Incoherent Domesticity (2025) and Interior with Mondrian Deformation (2025), anthropomorphic forms stage the viewer even more directly. This mise en abyme of the gaze, as often, leads to a certain blindness; Lasker seeks to restore the mean ing of painting to its plurality, suggesting the multiple paths it can take, keeping the viewer at their crossroads.