Jean-Philippe Dordolo: 3.01 am

'3.01 am' is a reference to the Hour of the Wolf, a phrase drawn from Swedish folklore for the hours between 3 am and 5 am. 'The Hour of the Wolf' is also a 1968 Ingmar Berman film.

"It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are more real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. The Hour of the Wolf is also the hour when most children are born."―Ingmar Berman

Drawing from an interest in Dutch painting and the grotesque, 3.01 am invites us into a world on edge, where familiar visual tropes haunt us. Brought on by the sort of anxiety-driven tricks our eyes play on us after dark. The minutes are drawn out and restless minds wander.

Flesh is rubberised, tongues, teeth revealed and nostrils flare. The subject of Jean-Philippe Dordolo’s work isn’t one of horror, yet it lingers leaving us questioning what we are witness to.

When viewed from a well-rested mind one is aware of the sense of the absurd, a playfulness even, where body becomes landscape, becomes sculpture. This is best seen in a series of monotypes in which the recurring motif of a reclined face drawn from the crease of the chin to forehead sits somewhere between portraiture and topographical study. When read as an undulating landscape it’s hard to not feel sorry for the pair of eyes forced to gaze abjectly at seemingly random objects balanced on the tip of the rising peak of the nose, lacking a shoulder, arm, elbow, or hand to topple or scratch the itch.

Dordolo uses the body as a prop to build upon akin to a plinth but with curves, peaks and valleys. The nose is like an entrance to a subterranean world. The faces become robust, if not structural, the laws of physics no longer exist.

Reconfigured takes on Donald Judd furniture, here made from spruce, aim to provide a home for two sculptures. Technically plinths, they act as furniture for the sculptures, rather than being exclusively for people. Judd’s Chair-Table-Chair (blue) has become Table-Chair-Table and the iconic Judd chair becomes inaccessible with the seating area set at 90cm from the floor.

'3.01 am' sees Dordolo exhibit paintings for the first time following a curiosity to a space often seen as far removed from object making. Searching for a more direct way of image making he began working directly onto panels with a palette knife, carefully rendering figures and grounds with tightly controlled flicks of the knife creating an impasto finish as if sculpting an image on a flat panel.

'3.01' am might be a time we seek to avoid however its power to transport, skew or inspire shouldn’t be underestimated.