Favela: An Interview with Jonathan Darby

Favela: An Interview with Jonathan Darby

24 March, 2011
by: Jessjb

Artist Jonathan Darby gives Jess Jones-Berney an insight into the brutal world behind his awesome new artwork.

With a degree from Central St Martins under his belt, you’d expect artist Jonathan Darby to be a stickler for intense deadlines. Not so much. As we sit amongst his latest exhibition, Favela, at Signal Gallery, he recalls how most of his uni days were spent side-lining deadlines and bullshitting “arty” meaning behind his work. “In the big bad world people don't give you projects. At St Martins they throw you in the deep end so you have to generate and fend for yourself.”

But it was a steep learning curve that paid off. Taking three years to fine tune his artistic voice, Jonathan’s pièce de résistance jammily commandeered St Martin's front window display. It was prime position, catching the eye of Signal Gallery's Chris Garlick, who invited Jonathan to do a group show. And boom, things have really taken off, with shows as far afield as Los Angeles and San Francisco.

But back to the matter in hand, what prompted Jonathan's latest work on the lost children of Brazil’s slums? He explains that stumbling across some moving photos by Gregory J. Smith “really struck a chord”, adding that this guy upped and left his lucrative business to help children in Sao Paulo. “The context of these photos were the catalyst for Favela. Kids are a big part of my work because they're the next generation and what happens to them will determine the future.” Favela itself is pretty heart-wrenching stuff, poignantly capturing anxious angelic faces in a sumptuous farrago of sepia.

Jonathan has transformed the gallery space into a makeshift slum with an abandoned assortment of children’s clothes, upturned games, broken windows and derelict shoes, all attesting to his relentless attention to detail. And penchant for destruction it would seem, considering he warned Signal's owners: “I'm gonna fuck this gallery up, so you can't be here to see it.” And it's a good thing they left him to it, because this exhibition/experience works by drawing you in. Foreboding music accompanies kids imprisoned and utterly unreachable behind bars. It highlights the downwards slum spiral that consumes them.

Jonathan reiterates the brutal favela environment of broken families and unequivocal violence, where drug traffickers rule the roost and callous authorities are unwilling to get to the root of the problem. He gestures to Roney. It's a stunning depiction of a boy with delicate eyelashes, ruby lips and a smooth face, but eroded by the harsh, tarnished background that's laden with images of guns and police corruption. Hearing how Roney was brutally killed by Brazilian police, it dawns on me that Jonathan's ability to conjure such a raw formula is what makes everything so affecting.

But it's the beautifully innocent face of Dudu that really perturbs me. His anxious expression radiates out of the consuming bleakness, while his body is branded with 'Enjoy Cocaine' logos and motifs of the Special Operations Battalion, whose violent clashes with drug gangs often prove fatal for these children. “Combining all these elements, the tones, the textures and incorporating the imagery and symbolism with their faces is really important to me,” Jonathan elaborates. And it's haunting how their distressed faces concurrently fade and emerge out of the distressed wood, almost as if they were being erased; something that aptly echoes Brazil's policy that it's easier to ignore these kids than actually help them.

I'm surprised to hear that Jonathan has never been to Brazil. This project came out of intense research and liaising with Gregory's Children At Risk Foundation, which receives a percentage of proceeds from the show. And it's clearly been a lot of hard work: “I worked three months non-stop for this show, no friends, no social life,”he says. Hence his anger with the exhibition's accompanying video, which shows his artistic process in the studio. “It makes it look like I'm painting on top of a fucking photograph,” he groans, quick to show me a newly edited version that depicts one face's fruition from start to finish, ringing truer to the painstaking process behind his work.

So, has the St Martins bum finally mastered the art of self-discipline? “Something massively changed for me in this body of work,” Jonathan tells me, adding that his art has always been about more than just making a statement: “I want to make a difference,” he says. And considering the humanitarian crux of Favela, this guy's definitely on track.

Favela is at Signal Gallery until 2nd April 2011.

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Jessjb