Jordan Sullivan searches for beauty in the circus of America

“America has always been a blood circus,” says Jordan Sullivan, a New York based painter and writer who grew up “in the rustbelt” of rural Ohio. “The myth and history of America were developed simultaneously, creating a fractured reality and a unique kind of psychosis within the country.” Only a painter like Jordan can get away with vicious takedowns of his country, because his paintings are absurdist, horrific and empathetic peepholes into a garbled nightmare-world that doesn’t look too different from the one we currently inhabit. In his series American Psychosis, which proves to be popular on Instagram, expletives are written in chemtrails, men urinate in the corners of art galleries and an act of self-immolation takes place in the middle of a nightclub. “My paintings attest to how deviancy, addiction, fantasy and dreams of destruction are symptoms of living in a country that is impossible to make sense of,” says Jordan. In these scenes, which often channel Harmony Korine’s suburban-absurdism and kitsch, Jordan attempts to reach into not a shared consciousness, but a shared psychosis. Still, a scruffy, lean type of beauty (and humour) prevails somehow, inspired by his work as a drug and alcohol counsellor for teenagers.

There’s an immediacy that drives Jordan to capture the current state of America, a type of documentarian obligation to fight against passing time. “Time doesn’t disappear, it accumulates, like dirt filling a grave, and it’s important to recognise the times and the history that came before, which still impact this moment,” says Jordan. In one particularly striking painting, Jordan transports an astronaut and Jesus’ crucifixion from the famous poster for William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration from the moon to the garden of an average home, implying that our world is as strange as anything in outer space. Be it lines of pensioners worshipping at an altar of slot machines or strippers back-lit by Tesla cybertrucks, Jordan makes sense of the world through nonsense, because why not? The world is topsy-turvy – art tends to follow suit. “I’m not sure we are still human,” says Jordan. “Sometimes I think we’ve evolved into something far more absurd.”

Jordan Sullivan’s new book Drinking Margaritas at the Mall is available now here.