Breaking the Waves: Jon Cuyson

In Breaking the Waves, I continue my exploration of abstraction as a layered site of memory, labor, and ecological entanglement. In this body of work, the straight line—once rendered with geometric precision using tape and graphite in reference to modernist form and architectural structures—has softened and fragmented. What remains are horizontal gestures applied with a roller, behaving like rhythmic intervals that chart time, gesture, and space.Traditionally a marker of separation, the line here becomes porous—evidence of erosion, repetition, and accumulated labor. It signals not only boundaries between land and sea, self and other, surface and depth, but also their dissolution. This line becomes a conceptual hinge: between abstraction and cartography, performance and mapping—anchoring my ongoing interest in queer, affective, and ecological resonances.

Water, both symbol and substance, is central to this work. It is a life-giving force, a site of migration and transformation, an archive of loss. As material, it carries the paint; as metaphor, it shapes the conceptual terrain. My approach to abstraction emerges not from detachment, but from surfaces steeped in memory, friction, and excess. Paint flows, evaporates, and settles like silt. Time becomes visible through layers shaped by gravity and touch.

Some canvases embed cast resin mussels and shells—interruptions that break the flatness of the surface with hybrid materiality. These works shift between surface and object, illusion and thing, holding gestures in suspension—as if frozen in a state of becoming. The palette is deliberately subdued: earth tones of beige, gray, and brown punctuated by glimmers of silver—suggesting sediment, drift, and reflected light. These hues invoke the weathered textures of the sea and the built environment, remaining elemental yet elusive, without collapsing into representation.

The exhibition title Breaking the Waves references Lars von Trier’s 1996 film—a meditation on love, suffering, and belief. Recast here, the phrase becomes a metaphor for the body’s fragility and endurance amid natural, social, and historical forces. My paintings, likewise, attempt to hold space for what is submerged but not erased—resilient, vulnerable, and quietly insistent.

Ultimately, Breaking the Waves is a meditation on matter, memory, and movement. It gathers the intimate and the planetary, the personal and the historical, in forms that drift, settle, and unfold over time.