In Search of Story: The Paintings of Jon Aley
 
To study the artwork of painter Jon Aley is to embark on a hundred different pathways to reach one fundamental idea. Many artists use a few core beliefs to explore various themes, but Aley's work revolves around a single, glowing nucleus and is explored in a different way on each canvas. His paintings manifest the importance of place and a belief in the connectedness of all things. His approach to capturing this idea can be seen in the progression of his past three series. His work also symbolizes the rise of post-postmodernism and his generation's need to feel connected to the earth, each other, and history.
 
Aley's paintings splice bits of reality—images of nature, feelings, cultural institutions, desires, and comedic expression—into a sense of place that can no longer be distinguished by its parts. The fields of color ever present in his work are evidence of his belief in the spiritual and mental influence of surroundings. Raised on a Missouri farm, perceptions of nature and the use of nature as a setting for several seemingly unrelated ideas are the tools he wields most often in his quest to articulate a narrative that runs through all things. Rarely do his vivid paintings acknowledge the influence of time. The objects and whispers of ideas seem to be outside of time, pulled together innately, forming an entirely new experience.
 
His work acknowledges that all reality is interconnected, so much so that separateness disappears. It calls the viewer to accept the connectedness of all things. Common objects such as buildings, animals, and sunsets are thrown together to represent not only their traditional settings, but also to form a new one. His practice of mimesis both imitates nature and also creates a new place for the viewer to explore. There are several accessible images in “Crucifix or Good Nights Sleep” like the woman's sensual backside, a concrete wall, and a simply drawn tree. Each piece hails from a unique experience and represents its own idea, but for Aley they come together organically, having natural connections to each other that enhance his understanding of each perception/notion as well as his place in the world. The experiences he welds together reassure him of his humanity and underlying truth. Not only does he wield the ability to bring cohesion to scattered sensory experiences, memories and ideas but he also culls forth their innate narrative.
 
Evidence of his gravitation toward this idea is manifest in his last three series. The oldest is a group of landscapes, each one remarkable in their clarity and packed with emotion. A dense forest reigned over by a restless golden sky in “Trees Moving Sky” is hardly devoid of the emotion that the viewer of this scene would surely be filled with. Each one grasps at enunciating the effect scenery has on us as well as what we infuse into our experience of scenery. In the series entitled Fractures, Aley brings his study of landscapes to life as only part of the scene, intersecting jagged fields and seeming to merge multiple scenes into one idea. Then most recently, in his Story or Narrative series, he adds representative objects to the mix, blending land, sky, water, buildings, and ideas with objects that are at times comedic and other times quite cryptic. Taken in chronological order, the three series document his journey to the center of this idea, each one refining the last. They reveal the importance of each element found in his current work.
 
Jon Aley is a painter for the post-postmodern era. What is overwhelming about his craft is his struggle to bring together pieces of perception and unite them in a primordial wholeness that is too often forgotten. It is a cry to depart from the understanding of life as separate, purposeless and random. Whereas his postmodern forbearers resigned themselves and the rest of the Western world to disown belief in meta-narratives, Aley is a representative of a generation grasping for connection to the earth, to history, and to the meaning found therein. While his predecessors might have brought together a similar slew of objects and color on a single canvas, they would have done so with irony. Aley is an earnest symbol of sincerity, representing the unshakable instinct that meaning and purpose and connection course through things tangible and intangible and can be perceived by careful attunement of the senses. His work has now and will continue to have something to offer the children of postmodernia. Not out to romanticize or reject meaning, they were born nomadic wanderers in search of a sense of place and belonging.