Jason Boyd Kinsella – born in Toronto and now  based between Oslo and Los Angeles – took up painting again in 2019  following a 30-year hiatus. Jason Boyd Kinsella’s paintings have all the clean-surfaced, tight-framed hallmarks of an old master painting, the stacked geometry of cubism, the illogical, dreamlike qualities of surrealism, yet jut out from their canvases like nothing else.

These geometric fragments, which the Canadian artist uses as building blocks to represent the complexity of the human condition, are simultaneously evoking our reliance on digital technology and its influence on our psyche. And it’s such focused interest in the human psyche that resulted in his work being labeled as hyper-contemporary psychological portraiture, as it allows him to create an endless amount of assemblages which then symbolize the endless combinations of character traits we’re all built from. With the purposely obvious use of technology and 3D rendering software in his creative process, the reference to interconnectivity between the natural and the artificial becomes even more relevant and somewhat personified.

Unveiling mankind’s psychological makeup lies at the heart of Kinsella’s practice. In his work, he breaks down the personality traits of his characters into distinct geometric units whose shape, colour and size define their individuality based on the Myers-Briggs personality test, anchoring his subjects in the essence of their psychological attributes. If the clean surface of his paintings may recall the Old Masters’ works, his aesthetic and methods are resolutely contemporary.

Obviating the anatomical characteristics that serve caricaturist and facial recognition technology so well, and eschewing the consumer habits that come to define who we are with the precision of an algorithm, Jason Boyd Kinsella is at once reductive and expository. Details are incidental, even gratuitous, to Kinsella who builds his personae as a kind of elemental architecture, an edifice whose structure is both emphatically geometric and discretely conceived as a psychological framework.

Though Jason’s assembled visages are as seductive as any, he has little inclination for the flattery by which the visual impersonation of another posits an idealized sense of immortality. His is not an art of particulars but an investigation of archetypes. Whereas most artists mine the emotional or physiognomic idiosyncrasies of their subjects to limn some empathic connection with the viewer, Kinsella is most concerned with articulating the primary archetypes of personality that make each of us, for all our differences, far more universal than unique.