It boils down to what makes an artist tick. Recently I shared an image of Borbay’s portrait of the actor Jon Hamm as Don Draper with a friend. Fascinated by the artist’s collage technique, she wondered why Borbay chose that creative path.
“Aristotle said it best,” Borbay answered. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
For Borbay, known outside the art world as Jason Borbet, collage elements embedded within a portrait are a reflection of the subject, their era, issues and, “of course, autobiographical elements of yours truly.” Each piece is a multi-tiered time capsule.
Borbay’s Jackson Hole opening show reception takes place at the Art Association on Thursday, July 7th, 6-8:00pm. Entitled “Painting Light,” the show remains up through July 30th, 2016. The show includes examples of Borbay’s collage works, acrylic and “neon” canvases. To preview the full show, click here.
As a 28-year-old Manhattan-based artist, Borbay broke his leg in a hockey game. That accident resulted in three months of life “time out.” Not fun, but Borbay used his time to begin exploring ideas in the abstract. An avid newspaper reader, Borbay found that news headlines began to blur and he became curious about how information is consumed. Borbay has written about the new art age for Forbes, so his antennae were up.
We all make first impressions, just as paintings do, Borbay reasons. But it takes knowing a personality, its thoughts, ideals, dreams, passions and idiosyncrasies to fully understand them.
“You might find something like “Bloomberg Bans Salt” next to “Two Wounded in Bed-Stuy Shootout,” directly across from advertisements boasting “JC Penny’s Year End Sale.” In other words, we are bombarded with non-sequential data from every direction.
This notion blossomed into a celebration of the proverbial ‘death of print’, so I combined a ‘primitive’ information channel with the complexity of a portrait. In my first self-portrait, Portrait of the Artist as a Not so Young Man and The Death of Print, I used two New York Post editions to share what was happening in the world within my own image, an image captured in Milan as I delivered two paintings to a collector. Gradually, my collage elements became more and more curated.”
We all make first impressions, just as paintings do, Borbay reasons. But it takes knowing a personality, its thoughts, ideals, dreams, passions and idiosyncrasies to fully understand them.
“In my paintings I strive to share something that is at first aesthetically interesting,” Borbay says. “But I want them to also offer continual discovery of something deeper. Art bears witness to your life, and what you choose to see evolves over time.”
https://squareup.com/store/art-association-of-jackson-hole/ http://www.borbay.com http://www.jacksonholearttours.com/ArtBlog/
Tammy Christel 
