Patrick H Jones: Crowded Emotions
On the Invisible Faces
An unprecedented density of faces unfolds across the recent works of Patrick H. Jones, accumulating until individuality itself begins to feel unstable. As one moves from face to face, projecting one figure after another onto them, a realization quietly emerges: the question is no longer who these faces resemble, but what becomes of a face when no one is watching. The ancient provocation posed by Plato through the Ring of Gyges1 in Republic has long since slipped its mythical frame. Today, invisibility is routine. We act unseen, choose anonymously, and reveal ourselves in spaces where responsibility has grown faint. Freed from the pressure of gaze and punishment, anonymous crowds appear to shed moral restraint—becoming volatile, irresponsible, and chaotic. Yet what happens if we pause to look at them one by one, to call each presence into focus? The exhibition Crowded Emotions opens precisely at this point of tension.
In the new works Jones presents at Duarte Sequeira Seoul, a marked shift from his recent practice is immediately evident. Abstraction gives way to greater specificity; human figures replace animals; dense crowds press tightly into the pictorial field.
Most striking is the recurring figure of the “man in ties,” repeated across canvases— figures that read less as individuals than as units functioning within a system. They obey visible rules. The joker, by contrast, appears to mock those rules, yet is simultaneously more deeply ensnared by them than anyone else. The suited gentleman and the painted clown are, Jones suggests, not opposites but reflections—two faces of the same capture. Jostling without clear purpose, afraid of missing something, they surge and collide, shouting their claims into the mass. Still, no definitive line is drawn between who is right—or wrong. As the exhibition unfolds, the crowd in Jones’s gaze reveals itself as a compression chamber of excessive emotions—anxiety, desire, emptiness, competitiveness—condensed into a single surface. And yet, within this suffocating density, Jones refuses to relinquish hope for the human individual. In Self Reflection, for the first time, a figure appears who meets another’s gaze while simultaneously confronting their own image—the sole subject who truly looks at themselves.
Standing amid flowers in full, uncontained bloom, unpartitioned by walls or doors, this figure holds its gaze steady. It is a gesture that resists surrender to collective affect, calling instead for a return to individual measure and responsibility.
In recent years, Jones has experienced profound emotional extremes—the death of his father, the birth of a child—and these have quietly reshaped the thematic core of his work. As loss and birth pressed outward from within, more concrete faces surfaced on the canvas. Yet the clearer these faces became, the more invisible they seemed. Within a crowd where collectivity and anonymity merge to produce near-identical visages, one must ask: with what face do we exist, and as what? At the very moment we believe ourselves unseen, are we still capable of existing distinctly—not as “we,” but as “I”? As Jones himself has noted, this body of work speaks both to the emotions held by individuals and to the notion that crowds, too, possess emotions of their own. We are beings required to function as part of a collective while remaining, insistently, individual within it. Have we forgotten that living among others demands a constant deferral of total sameness? Jones’s latest works refuse to release that discomforting question, holding it open until the very end.
— Jisun Yim
1 Ring of Gyges: A thought experiment introduced in Plato’s Republic, in which a ring that grants invisibility is used to examine how anonymity and immunity from punishment transform human morality, desire, and responsibility for one’s actions. In contemporary visual art discourse, it is frequently referenced as a key conceptual framework for interpreting anonymity, crowds, masks, and structures of power.
