We Are Dreamers On The Other Side Of The Moon

Title: We Are Dreamers On The Other Side Of The Moon
Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 127cm x 190cm
Year: Mar of 2013“


Only by accepting our desires can we begin to understand who we are.” This philosophical rumination, scrawled Zen-like across a dream world filled with a child’s playful wish list, animates and gives fruition to Jon Jaylo’s latest gesamtkunstwerk, titled We Are Dreamers On The Other Side Of The Moon. A continuation of his series of dream-like images of a mirror world focused on the phantasmic desires of a child (actually, the artist’s son), the painting introduces to Jaylo’s public the twin infusions of a techno-utopian throwback (distilled into the postmodern aesthetic of “steampunk”), and an alternate reality activated by a child’s desire to be free of adult supervision (like the character Max in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are). In Jaylo’s work, these two concerns comingle with the central focus of the story, Jaylo’s child-character (which may also be seen as a mirror image of Jaylo himself, looking back to the innocence of his own youth), who like in earlier iterations like A Song For Alice wears a distinctive metallic top hat, a shirt, bow tie and waistcoat, and flashes a lucky hand of cards. It is what is in the top hat and arm that signifies the difference: an antique clock, a World War One-era aviator goggles, and a metallic contraption with power buttons. These, along with blast furnace goggles worn by a large teddy bear at the back, signifies the promising techno-utopianism of a century ago, when Jules Verne and H.G. Wells spoke of a fantastic tomorrow filled with steam-powered machines.
This child with his menagerie of animal-headed humans serves as a magic mirror image, a fantasy depiction that is the reverse of the bleak reality we experience, and one that existed, in the wistful memories of the artist when he was a child, across space and beyond the beckoning moon, seen just to the top of the painting, amidst a sky filled with nautilus-shaped air balloons. One might feel compelled to call this a group portrait of a child and the playmates he animates with his imagination, just as Sendak’s Max creates an alternate play world. But if the surreal floating heart of a head on the left is any indication, it is that Jaylo reimagines himself through that portrait as a musing adult that revisits childlike innocence, but is instead comforted by the joy that he has envisioned upon others.

- Reuben Ramas Cañete, PhD