Jacob Littlejohn: Cosmia

Jacob Littlejohn approaches landscape as a conceptual sphere, rather than genre, establishing it as a focal point where the conscious and subconscious meet. Through continually re working intervals of space, rhythm, and perspective, the paintings in his solo exhibition, Cosmia become a site of unity, a conduit for both grounded earthiness and supernatural reality to coexist.

Richly layered, their surfaces perpetually shifting, Littlejohn’s paintings capture chronologies dispersed across space and time, akin to weathered patinas, or even astrological events like comet showers, in which our perception is far delayed from the observed event transpiring, but still experienced in the here and now. Some canvases evoke an undulating universe, submerged, underwater; others, an ever-expanding sky, untethered from gravity. Across Littlejohn’s work, etherealness and ephemerality have a weightiness, mirrored by the generous, almost sculptural, application of paint. It is on the threshold of this tension between the infinitesimal and the infinite that the viewer finds themself: minuscule within the vastness of the universe depicted, yet centrally located within it.

Littlejohn notes that the term Cosmia can be many things: fictional, poetic, or even operating as a marker of individual awareness within the world. In this series of work, the latter seems most present: personal interpretation and histories are paramount, but never didactic. The narratives woven by Littlejohn’s paintings do not concern themselves with truth or fiction: instead they are a mythology of motion, focused on the movement that storytelling offers, both propellant and cyclical.