“I was very interested in car design when I was younger,” recalls painter Jasper Marsalis. “I took this summer course, and the instructor explained that in their prototypal phase, you could only draw cars facing one direction. That really bothered me.”
That anecdote foreshadows the fixations that would emerge, years later, in the 28-year-old musician and artist’s work: a subversion of perspectival conventions, a complication of linearity, and an emphasis on the unreliability of optical experience.
“It sparked my fascination with art-making, or with art-making as a suite of questions,” says Marsalis, who is currently on the road touring his debut album, Excelsior, under the moniker Slauson Malone 1. Today, his artwork—the result of that suite of questions—sprawls well beyond a single medium.
Intimately scaled oil paintings depict the vastness of light, while large-scale works contract as if under pressure. Occasionally, Marsalis makes three-dimensional “drawings” out of soldered aluminum pieces that glisten like spider webs on the surface of his canvases.
In his exhibitions, one finds bowling balls on a gallery floor, their holes stuffed with ear plugs or their rotundity interrupted with a wooden wedge. These anthropomorphic sculptures capture the simple physicality of the human figure—they make you feel the weight of your head on your shoulders.
In solo exhibitions at Los Angeles’s Kristina Kite Gallery, London’s Emalin, New York’s Svetlana, and Minneapolis’s Midway Contemporary Art, the prolific young multi-hyphenate has channeled his fixation with the insufficiency of the senses into artworks that force viewers to interrogate their own ability to perceive the world.
And the ear, he contends, is just as treacherous as the eye. Marsalis’s musical output is as compositionally attuned to disorder and chaos as the artist’s two-dimensional work. For the Los Angeles native, the stage and the picture plane are interdependent, parallel forums for expression, but that doesn’t make the exchange a seamless one.
“Going between music and art, two economic worlds that secretly I think really hate each other,” he muses, “that’s an inherently unstable position.”
For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features on Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Emma Stern, and Jo Messer.
