Jonas Ropponen is literally all over his new series of paintings for Chapter House Lane. Hair, blood, semen, saliva and fingernail clippings feature in combination with splashes of pigment and pulped Watchtower magazines – a nod to his upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness. Sculpture meets painting meets personal history.

Born in Sweden and Melbourne-based, Jonas explains that his textured abstract pieces are ‘as much an investigation into colour, materials and processes, as they are repositories of my DNA’. The by-products of human life, instead of being thrown away, are here captured, layered and composed together into arresting swirls of colour.

Jonas reveals both himself and his process by combining found materials with a bright palette of blue, yellow and red. The colours draw you in to look closer and provide an anchor point for navigating the paintings, revealing work that’s both personal and abstract, grotesque and joyful, hectic and intuitive.

Jonas Ropponen is an artist, arts writer and sessional printmaking lecturer at RMIT and Monash University. He has a diverse practice spanning sculpture, painting, printmaking and alter ego projects. For the past decade Jonas has shown his work nationally and internationally, and over that time it has been acquired by numerous public institutions and private collectors. He was a recipient of The Australia Council for the Arts ARTSTART grant in 2013 and in 2014 held the solo exhibition The Snowy River from the Man at C3 Gallery. For more from the artist, click here.

Artist talk

Join us to hear Jonas discuss his work, process and the ‘Pubism’ series at Chapter House Lane on Thursday 22 January, 6pm.