Jonathan Syme Coaxes Spirit from Matter at Royale Projects

*Jonathan Syme, Receding, Shy Daylight, 2024, oil on canvas in artist frame, 43” x 37”. Courtesy of Royale Projects*

Jonathan Syme paints like someone coaxing spirit from matter—a phrase that sounds mystical until you’re standing in front of the work, where it becomes simply descriptive. As restless as they seem, his canvases don’t argue or perform; they resonate, like a vibration passed through the soles of your feet. Thick skeins of paint are unearthed, revealing strata in a geologic dig of intuition. There’s a kind of archaeology to the gesture: gouges, stains, and eruptions of impasto build a type of sedimentary record, chronicling attention. The eye slows down, and with it, thought.

*Exhibition view of Jonathan Syme’s As A Rooted Spectre. Courtesy of Royale Projects*

Formally, the works flirt with chaos but land—gracefully—on the side of orchestration. The color is ecstatic, often riotous, but never clumsy. Each mark seems born of impulse and then subjected to care, as though instinct and revision were in a constant, cordial debate. Syme’s hand is unmistakably present but never vain. You can detect echoes—Kandinsky’s cosmology, De Kooning’s lush violence, a Grosse-like bravado—in the chroma, but they pass like incense in the air. More persistent is the sense that Syme is painting in search of something closer to a presence than merely a picture. These are devotional objects—not in any formal religious sense, but in their seriousness of purpose. One gets the distinct feeling they were made in earnest, resolute solitude.

*Detail shot of Jonathan Syme’s Australis Chasm, 2024, oil on canvas in artist frame, 43” x 37”. Courtesy of Royale Projects*

The retro sculptural frames around Syme’s wall works—handmade and painted with a kind of primitive reverence—seal the works like reliquaries. They mark the edge not just of the painting, but of a kind of threshold. You don’t so much look at Syme’s paintings as stand before them, the way you might approach a private altar or a weathered ruin. They offer no answers, of course, like most art, only residue: of thought, motion, maybe even longing. But for all their seriousness, the paintings never feel ponderous. There’s wit in the restraint, even a flicker of joy in the way the paint behaves. Syme may be excavating something ancient, but the result is undeniably alive. In a time when so much abstraction feels either too calculated or too loose, these paintings thrum with that rarest of qualities—conviction.

Jonathan Syme: As A Rooted Spectre
Through August 31, 2025
Royale Projects
432 S. Alameda Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
www.royaleprojects.com

About the writer: Stephen Wozniak is an arts writer and exhibiting artist based in Los Angeles who has written feature articles, exhibition reviews and conducted interviews for the Observer, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, Artillery, The Baltimore Sun, Art Spiel and other publications. He has also written critical essays for major commercial galleries and museum exhibition catalogs. To learn more: www.stephenwozniakart.com. Visit on Instagram: @stephenwozniakart.