Thinking About Danger

LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES

July 23 - September 3, 2022

1110 Mateo St.
Los Angeles, CA 90021

The paintings in JOHN BROOKS: Thinking About Danger combine images and inspiration from art history, cinema, literature, music, and the artist's personal life to explore longing and remote desire, empathy and connection. The richness of experiences as well as a kind of "existential openness" is alluded to in the exhibition’s title which is taken from a painting of the same name and borrows lyrics from the Marianne Faithful song “Times Square.” Their subjects are our lives: what is and what can be, the known and the unknown. These are not ordinary paintings—they are meant for all of us—and the reading and understanding of them need not be ordinary. In truth, they invite us to lose ourselves in their openness and, as the Sufi poet Rumi enjoins, “come out of the circle of time and into the circle of love.”