Neon Parc | Studio Jean

John Spiteri
‘Studio Jean’

Brunswick
5 Sep.–4 Oct.
2025

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Neon Parc is thrilled to present ‘Studio Jean’, a solo exhibition of new paintings by John Spiteri, opening at Neon Parc Brunswick on Friday 5 September, 6–8pm.

John Spiteri’s practice is defined by an experimental approach to painting, one that thrives on unpredictability and shifts between abstraction and figuration. In ‘Studio Jean’, this tension continues to unfold across canvases layered with earthy tones, smudges, scratches, stains and stencilled outlines. Spiteri’s paintings feel alive, emanating with restless energy. Gestures and figures flicker across their surfaces, submerging and re-emerging like unstable fragments of memory.

Central to these new paintings is Spiteri’s ongoing dialogue with his own archive of images and motifs. Figures recur across the canvases in different orientations, scales, and levels of visibility, drawn from earlier works and reanimated through new painterly contexts. This process of exhuming and repopulating imagery transforms the canvas into a kind of studio-in-painting, where forms are tested, erased, and returned. In this way, ‘Studio Jean’ is both iterative and self-reflexive, a continuation of Spiteri’s fascination with painting as an accumulative, cyclical practice.

Despite the layered complexity of these works, Spiteri achieves a remarkable lightness of touch. In ‘Android Summer’, elongated outlines, androgynous, long-limbed figures, and disembodied faces obscured by streaks of oil drift through abstract passages. The composition suggests a veiled narrative unfolding beneath layers of paint. While in ‘Monsieur Chocolat’, the artist conjures a sensual Bacchus, grapes woven into the youthful figure’s curly hair. An arm reaches beyond the edge of the stretched canvas where a hidden line of provocative fruit and vegetable emojis reside. A hint at indulgence, desire and the visual innuendoes of the digital age.

Each painting invites viewers to trace its surface, to follow the marks, gestures, and interruptions as they shift between coherence and collapse. The paintings resist fixed meaning, instead unfolding like speculative fictions — worlds populated by fragmented bodies, uncanny objects, and fleeting impressions.

‘Studio Jean’ is an exhibition about the act of painting as much as the images themselves. It foregrounds process: layering and erasure, repetition and mutation, the careful balancing of accident and intention. Through this, Spiteri creates paintings that remain unstable, provisional, and alive with discovery. They are both deeply personal artefacts of the artist’s studio and expansive invitations for viewers to enter into their slippery terrain.

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‘Studio Jean’ is John Spiteri’s fifth solo exhibition at Neon Parc. Spiteri completed a Master of Fine Arts at the College of Fine Arts (UNSW) in 2001 and studied at Goldsmiths College, London in 1996 and 2002. Recent exhibitions include Sulman Prize, The Art Gallery of NSW, 2025, curated by Elizabeth Pulie; ‘Underfoot’, Te Uru, Auckland, New Zealand in 2024, curated by James Gatt; ‘Living Patterns’, Queensland Art Gallery, 2023, curated by Ellie Buttrose; and ‘Thin Skin’, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2023, curated by Jennifer Higgie; ‘Painting more painting’, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2017; ‘Learning to Leave’, VCA Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; ‘There’s no Time’, The lan Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 2011; ‘Negotiating this world’, The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), 2013; and ‘Daydream Believers’, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2012.

John Spiteri’s work is held in major public and private collections including the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne. Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), Brisbane; The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney; and Monash University Gallery, Melbourne.

Artworks

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