Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Month: October, 2026

Patrick Jackson

François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

View of “Patrick Jackson: All Signs Fail,” 2026. From left: Memorial, 2026; Untitled (Mother and Child), 2026. Photo: Paul Salveson

Patrick Jackson did not make the cobwebs that, on my visit to his show, tangled around the scaffolding supporting his billboard sculpture Memorial, 2026, but he didn’t brush them away, either. Visitors who venture behind the giant forty-four-foot-wide printed image that splits the gallery diagonally encounter a “behind-the-scenes” area of dusty and cramped corridors that establishes a complicated set of relations between frontality and interiority, contrivance and authenticity, desire and disappointment. The exhibition’s title directs us to the artist’s position: “All Signs Fail.”

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John Hodgkinson

House of Seiko, Los Angeles

John Hodgkinson, No. 27, 2026, oil on linen, aluminum frame, 15 3/8 × 3 × 1 1/2″

The defining quality of any hyperrealist artwork is situated in the degrees to which it deviates from—or falls short of—the object it seeks to reproduce. If a Photorealist painting were indistinguishable from a photograph, there would be nothing to look at, nothing to think about.

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