Enjoy “Alchemy of the Internal Self” – a new show at Perrotin Gallery Shanghai and discover the work of Jason Boyd Kinsella following him in his foray into combining various mediums, such as painting, sculpture, and video. Kinsella is a portraitist not much interested in what people look like. His portraits have no people in them at all, in fact, or at least not the way we’re accustomed to seeing ourselves.

At the core of Kinsella’s art is the representation of the human mind and psychology. Drawing on subjective perspectives, the artist explores the nature of the human psyche by breaking down traits and personalities into geometric units, defining individuality through various shapes, colors, and sizes.

Kinsella understands portraits can do one of two things: they can capture the likeness of their subject—the contours of a face, their jawlines, their creases and crags. Or they can distill something truer, where likeness is secondary to affect.

This is the difference between what someone looks like to others, and what they look like to themselves. Good portraits are always psychological portraits.

We are all utterly convinced that we engage with the world in deeply specific ways legible only to us, our perceptions and quirks and mechanisms irreducible. But the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator prescribes only 16 possible personalities, 16 ways of being in the world (introvert/extrovert; carefree/worried, and so on).

Nevermind that these binaries are mostly rejected as pseudoscience. Kinsella, having successfully jettisoned traditional facial structures, finds new purchase for the typology, an abiding fascination ignited by a childhood gift of a Briggs book. He maps the Indicator’s precepts onto intricate, teetering assemblies of geometric forms — building blocks, literally, of psychological attributes.

Though his subjects are often seen as idiosyncratic or surreal, it is important to note that Kinsella emerges from a longer, more rigorous tradition of geometric abstraction: from Mondrian’s mystic grids, through Charles Biederman’s structural reliefs, and into the cosmic scaffolding of Al Held. Where those artists sought to map universal truths, Kinsella, instead, turns the architecture inward toward the fractured terrain of the psyche.

This, in the end, is the stuff of real alchemy, the domain of the best portraitists—Rembrandt, Neel—though Kinsella builds with stranger parts. The pipes, beams, and spheres somehow carry human weight. A Pixar movie: the toys have frozen around us with an incredible air of vulnerability and secrecy. The emotional arc, as hard to describe as it is, is uncanny, tender, powerful.

PERROTIN GALLERY
Alchemy of the Internal Self
THROUGH 24 OCTOBER 2025
SHANGHAI
https://www.perrotin.com

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