Jimi Gleason and the Looking Glass
Water has always had a special relationship with light. It bends it, holds it, and gives it back wholly transformed. In doing so, water reveals the observer as much as the observed. Growing up between Newport Beach and Hawaii, Jimi Gleason absorbed this knowledge early. The Pacific was his first canvas: endlessly mutable, luminous, alive with movement. Asked recently about confronting career doubt as a younger artist, Gleason said he'd go back home and "just start surfing again, and be in nature."
Jimi Gleason in front of his work
Decades later, standing before one of his paintings, you feel a sort of tidal pull, sensing that the surface is watching you back and calling you forth, much in the way that ocean waves often do.
Gleason's practice is inseparable from the Southern California arts traditions that shaped it. Coming of age alongside a generation of artists reckoning with the limits of the Conceptual Art Movement, he was drawn to making work and learning from mentors who did not demand conclusions from the viewer. His mentor Ed Moses (one of the defining figures of American Postwar art and West Coast abstraction) famously said: "People always ask me, 'Well, what do you paint?' I say, 'I paint canvas.' They think that that's a kind of joke, but it isn't a joke. It's very direct. I'd like to make it very clear that I'm not creative and I'm not trying to express myself. I'm an explorer, I'm trying to discover things, discover the phenomenal world by examining it, by looking at it, by playing with materiality."
Jimi Gleason at his studio
Like his mentor, Gleason plays with materiality, but his practice is wholly distinct from his pedagogical predecessor. Distinct not only in process but in impact.
Unlike Moses' abstract paintings, Gleason's work cannot be fully seen without being entered, and not merely conceptually. The viewer can literally see themselves reflected within the mirror-like surface of his canvases. In some works, the sheen produces a distorted, shadow-like image; in others, fragments of the self emerge with startling clarity: an eye, an ear. William Turner Gallery's exhibition text for his show Prima Materia drew on the mythology of Narcissus to describe this encounter. The Greek myth has been interpreted in the Western canon not only as a cautionary tale of self-obsession but as a story about discovering love through nature, and specifically through water. Standing before a Gleason, the allegory holds. You are not simply looking at a painting. You are looking at yourself, refracted in the looking glass.
It is through this encounter that Gleason's practice most fully distinguishes itself from the tradition that formed him. Where Moses sought to dissolve the self in abstraction, Gleason returns us: the self appears transfigured, implicated, and undeniable. In an era where self-obsession is the norm thanks to the constancy of social media, Gleason’s work gains a new relevance.
Laguna Beach, 2023. Silver nitrate acrylic on canvas. 30” x 24”
The Light and Space movement of the 1970s held that perception itself was the subject: that art's highest purpose was not representation, but activation. A decade later, Gleason took that proposition and began to make it material. The process itself is closer to chemistry than craft: silver nitrate applied to acrylic-coated canvases, a technique drawn from the world of industrial manufacture. It transforms each painting into a surface of near-alchemical complexity. The silver deposit is not "paint" in a conventional sense. It behaves more like water: shifting with the angle of light, the time of day, and the position of the body standing before it.
"By using an iridescent surface coat," Gleason has said, "I have managed to create visual spaces that respond to both the play of light and the location of the viewer."
The result is a work that is never twice the same: a mirror that neither flatters nor deceives, but simply reflects the eye of the beholder and their immediate environs.
This reflective quality is not incidental to Gleason's vision; it is the vision. His paintings do not contain light so much as conduct it, drawing the external world (its color, its movement, its unpredictable shifts) into the surface and returning it altered. The viewer becomes implicated, their presence registered and transformed as surely as the light itself. In this sense, Gleason's work is less object than event: something that happens rather than something that is.
Mirror Trac, 2018. Silver nitrate acrylic on canvas. 42x40”
The technical mastery underpinning this vision was hard-won. After completing his BFA at UC Berkeley in 1985 and studying printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, Gleason spent formative years in New York City working as a photo assistant and photo technician. Living in Alphabet City during an era still reverberating with the energy of Basquiat and Warhol, he maintained focus, developing a fluency with light and chemical processes that would later prove essential. Returning to California, he worked for five years in the studio of Ed Moses, deepening his understanding of materiality and the possibilities of the painted surface. The disciplines of printmaking, photography, and abstract painting converged into a practice that is entirely Gleason's own.
The critical reception has been commensurate with the ambition. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, art critic David Pagel captured something essential about the experience of standing before Gleason's work: "In Gleason's deliciously unnatural abstractions, the devil is not in the details only because diabolical beauty spills so profusely from every nook and cranny. His densely textured surfaces are a cornucopia of unimaginable delights."
Gleason's paintings are held in significant public and private collections worldwide, and have been exhibited at institutions including the Hammer Museum, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, the Laguna Art Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Tucson Museum of Art.
Gleason lives, works, and surfs in Southern California, where light continues to refuse containment. Light breaking off water, hitting chrome, dissolving edges, insisting on itself without apology. In that environment, one can assume painting feels less like depiction than participation.
Jimi Gleason: Selected Works - Gallery Chang, New York
Article by Gallery Chang Program Coordinator Celestina Billington