Flowers, cars, people sometimes. Almost Nothing…
Jonas Desmed compulsively captures the mediocre and the liminal - that what is on the threshold of perceptible-, giving a chance of survival to what is generally considered less beautiful.
He’s inspired by the ordinary, the everyday, by things that escape everyone’s attention without attempting to intellectualise it. His approach is more a compulsion than a form of aesthetic pursuit. For him, drawing is a primal, automatic means of expression - a need.

His art lies in the act of doing, undoing, and repeating. He doesn’t attempt to conceal the successive layers that accumulate on the canvas. On the contrary, he embraces crossing things out, making rough corrections, and starting again, letting mediums mix unpredictably as the layers build. Jonas seeks to make this accumulation of gestures -the creative process- visible, even tangible. He thrives in routine and habit, which compel him to draw the same subjects endlessly, hundreds of times, yet never the same way.

Born in Brussels in 1978, Jonas has no formal training in visual arts. He spent years dulling his professional boredom by filling notebooks with ballpoint pen drawings, eventually transitioning to creating directly on his living room floor or kitchen table—not out of ambition, but from a drive to experiment and create.

He doesn’t have a proper studio. Once completed, his drawings are sorted, stored, and forgotten. The next evening, he start anew with an empty A4 on an empty kitchen table.

It is only at the insistence of those who stumbled upon his art that Jonas agreed to share it.

FLOWERS and things.
Flowers are omnipresent in Jonas Desmed’s work. Some of his bouquets bloom languidly in vases set on charming checkered tablecloths, some are composed of sad, ambitionless flowers -like those found on the cemetery. These flowers struggle to fulfil their decorative purpose, lacking conviction. Yet, their decay feels far more fitting, better suited to a dreary living room or a hospital room than the artificial perfection of red roses or wire-stiffened gerberas typically brought to these spaces.

These rather unremarkable and uninspiring flowers sit alongside barely perceptible tables, sketched with a casual ballpoint pen stroke; vases and glasses recur like obsessive motifs; and dented cars—drawn since Jonas’ childhood, when he called them his "flat powers."

In his brute and naive style, he transforms rather uninteresting items into series of utterly intriguing images that capture your imagination.

Exhibitions

• 2023 Taken from a Fixed Point, duo exhibition of Jonas Demsed & Sven Laurent at Fondation Moonens, Brussels, curated by Laurent De Meyer

• 2022 Extrasmall #7, group exhibition, Maison des Arts de Schaerbeek

• 2022 Des Fleurs, solo exhibition presented by Mydriase, former presbytery of Saint-Avit-de-Vialard, France