Jason Boyd Kinsella` s portraits, a blend of psychological architecture and sculptural precision, treat the human face not as likeness but as landscape — a terrain where emotion, memory, and logic intersect in exquisite geometries.

Now showing at Perrotin Shanghai, Kinsella’s exhibition “Alchemy of the Eternal Self” presents thirteen paintings and a single bronze sculpture that together form a portrait of inner life in flux. Each work reads like an x-ray of the psyche: radiant, clinical, and yet strangely tender.

The Uneasy Garden

Kinsella’s large-scale painting Le Jardin (2025) anchors the exhibition — and perhaps, the artist’s restless consciousness. Painted in grayscale, the scene is haunted by disquiet: monochrome creatures writhe in soft distress beneath the arc of a ribcage-like dome. The composition echoes Picasso’s “La Guerre et la Paix” murals in Vallauris — the apocalyptic and the utopian colliding in a single breath.

If Picasso painted humanity’s duality, Kinsella internalizes it. His Le Jardin is not a moral allegory but an emotional anatomy, a garden grown from unease.

The world froths and whips.

– The artist says, describing his act of painting under the Mediterranean sun, the hum of cicadas underscoring his anxiety.

Each stroke feels like an exhalation; each brush bristles a nerve.

The work’s tension — its near-surgical precision held against organic chaos — captures the paradox at the core of Kinsella’s practice: the mind as both machine and garden, both system and soul.

Painting Personality: From Sketch to Psyche

Kinsella’s process begins with an unfiltered sketch, a rapid stream of consciousness that later refines into an immaculate surface. His paintings, smooth as computer renderings, seem to hover between the tactile and the digital. Yet their perfection is deceptive: beneath the cool surfaces lies raw vulnerability.

Influenced by Alan Watts and Taoist wu wei — the principle of “effortless action” — Kinsella allows his forms to “float together.” In Lennox (2025), warm-toned planks and luminous spheres stretch into airy balance; Helen (2025) gathers cream and lavender blocks around pale circular fruits. The effect is meditative — as if geometry itself were breathing.

These portraits, built on Myers-Briggs personality archetypes, map individuality through proportion, color, and volume. Where once the face was flesh, now it is structure: cubes of introversion, spheres of intuition, slabs of reason. Kinsella visualizes what psychology only theorizes — that identity is not static, but a fragile assembly of parts forever negotiating harmony.

Sculpting Thought

Among the canvases stands Julia (2025), Kinsella’s lone bronze sculpture — and perhaps the exhibition’s most eloquent figure. Born from an earlier painting, Julia steps into the round, her body composed of intersecting geometric forms balanced on a cantilevered rod. She evokes Henry Moore’s grounded dignity crossed with Jacques Lipchitz’s fragmented lyricism, embodying grace through instability.

This translation from paint to metal signals a deepening of Kinsella’s inquiry: how does form hold emotion? In Julia, geometry becomes corporeal — the rational made sensual, the cold made warm.

The Dance of the Minimal

Kinsella’s smaller painting Francis (2025) pares everything down to a few suspended shapes orbiting a spiraled sheet of paper. The composition is quiet, kinetic — like Calder in slow motion. It demonstrates Kinsella’s ability to balance joy and seriousness, the intuitive and the artificial.

Then comes Luna (2025), a visual counterpoint to the anxiety of Le Jardin. Borrowing the posture of a gleaner from Jean-François Millet’s 1853 “The Gleaners”, Kinsella’s Luna kneels, tending to an unseen garden. Her form is softer, more biomorphic — less diagram, more dream. In this piece, the artist allows hope to enter the frame, the geometry bending toward tenderness.

An Architecture of Feeling

Though often labeled “idiosyncratic” or “surreal,” Kinsella’s practice belongs to a grand lineage — from Mondrian’s mystic grids to Al Held’s cosmic scaffolds. Yet where they sought universal order, Kinsella turns the compass inward. His architecture maps not the cosmos but consciousness itself.

In this sense, his art is a new kind of portraiture — one that replaces the face with its emotional blueprint. The pipes, beams, and spheres in his compositions are not symbolic stand-ins but emotional vessels, carrying human weight through nonhuman forms. They feel, paradoxically, alive — like characters paused mid-thought in a digital purgatory.

The comparison to Pixar’s frozen toys — suspended between animation and stillness — is apt. Kinsella’s figures seem to breathe, to worry, to dream, all within their immaculate stillness.

The Alchemy of the Self

Born in Toronto in 1969 and based between Oslo and Los Angeles, Jason Boyd Kinsella returned to painting in 2019 after a thirty-year hiatus. His comeback feels less like a return and more like a revelation — a re-entry into art through the language of psychology and abstraction.

If alchemy is the transformation of base matter into gold, Kinsella’s alchemy is the transformation of data into empathy. His works convert personality theory into poetry, giving form to what usually remains invisible: the architecture of thought, the scaffolding of selfhood.

In Alchemy of the Eternal Self, he shows that the truest portraits are not of faces but of feelings — geometry lit from within by consciousness.