Jordan Sears’ paintings emanate fluorescent ennui. Like a corrupted floppy disk or a VHS tape that has warped with age, the artist’s paintings sit at the edges of familiarity, saturated with disquiet, nostalgia, and a distinctly feminine sense of performance with its corollary feelings of appeasement and anxiety. At once implying instances of heightened emotions, the works also feel strangely remote, like stills from a film half-remembered, compelling in their distance and haunting in their restraint.

Sears lifts found images – film stills, screenshots, listings – and decontextualises them, sitting with them for weeks or months until they accrete into paintings. These isolated images are then cropped, manipulated, and distilled into compositions, their remnants rendered in resonant oil paints. Building colour in layers over two or three passes, Sears’ palettes are created using the raw luminescence of the canvas to create a sense of submerged radiance, an intensity rendered purely through restraint.

Much like the work of Cindy Sherman¹, Sears’ practice plays with the idea of femininity and archetypes. The works metonymically focus on small details which imply larger, unspoken emotions. Works like Glimmers of Stardom and Stage Glow evoke a distinctly feminine, internal dialogue – a discord between what is felt and what is shown. Small details such as a halo of illuminated hair under stage lights, and a visage with starred eyes disguising inner turbulence bespeak the cultivation of beauty under duress. 

The artist uses framing not just as composition, but as a mode of thought. Her use of canvas shape not only lends the works a filmic quality, but also creates paintings steeped in implication and anticipation. Sears builds frames like thresholds – long, narrow, elliptical – inviting the viewer to peer in, voyeuristically, with an implicit tension lying in what cannot be seen.

Sears is influenced by the sonorous, glittering palettes of Louise Giovanelli², but also her iconography of celebrity; Andy Warhol’s³ distinctive and often dark use of seriality to hold a mirror to the world, alongside his distinctive use of grain and texture, and his way of holding a mirror to the world; Gerhard Richter’s⁴ obscured compositions, and his quiet refusal to explain the significance of his images. The influence of Domenico Gnoli⁵ can also be sensed, especially in works such as Silk Blouse and Ties, where close cropping and a focus on surface and fabric bridge iconographies of late Twentieth century hyperrealism and Renaissance detailing. Josef Albers’⁶ theories of colour relativity also guide Sears in moments of pause, informing her palette and her distinctive use of colour. Sears also pulls from more pedestrian influences, image economies built through proximity and desire such as Etsy, eBay, Depop – all, meaningfully, online spheres more frequently occupied by women. So too does she reference films and television shows such as Paris, Texas⁷, The Sopranos, Gail Palmer’s Candy Goes to Hollywood⁸, and Chantal Akerman’s The Golden 80s, creating a collage of references flashing before the viewer. 

In their unresolved tension, the works echo theorist Anna Kornbluh’s sense of faltering mediation in a culture dominated by immediacy. Like the last neon signs in Hong Kong – glistening, nostalgic – their lurid palettes and heightened gesture speaks in the language of soap operas played on mute, melodrama without soundtrack, potent afterimages.