""What is done is done, and what is yet to come is yet to come.""
""It's a death of sorts," he told me in his Brooklyn studio, "but it's also a form of birth, the painting isn't complete until it's dipped.""
""It's the end of the world," Jeffers said as we looked at the fisherman together in his Brooklyn studio, "but it's also just Tuesday.""
""You can take a bleak idea," he told me, "and dress it in absurdity. People will look longer.""
Oliver Jeffers stages ritual "dip" performances in which portraits are displayed briefly then submerged in vats of hot enamel paint, observed in silence by an invite-only audience with no photography allowed. Each performance ends with a whiskey toast of "What is done..." and reframes the painted destruction as both death and birth, with subjects often feeling relief. Jeffers pairs dark themes—death, climate change, violence—with humor in works called "Disaster Paintings," depicting absurd apocalyptic scenes like a city bus floating in a lake or fishermen amid a meteor strike. The work uses absurdity to prolong viewer engagement.
Read at ARTnews.com
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