Jack Carden
Jack Carden is a painter and creative director who refuses the art world’s instruction manual. He disrupts the expected, interrogates its conventions, and yet moves through its spaces with the confident unpredictability of someone who knows the game and chooses not to play by its rules. His work is a raw visual outcry — unpolished, unmediated and unafraid — charting the contradictions that shape a young creative mind under pressure.
There’s an unmistakable friction in his images and his media output — a tension that feels familiar but defies tidy explanation. Restless yet precise, confrontational yet eerily recognisable, Carden’s art doesn’t ask to be understood so much as it dares you not to.
Sinner Songwriter (iii) explores what I see as the two core drivers of all human life: sex and death. A simplified depiction of life, holistically.
At our most fundamental level, we are biologically motivated by two forces. The instinct to survive, rooted in a fear of death, and the desire to reproduce, rooted in the continuation of our genetic material. Strip away culture, morality, ambition, and identity, and these two impulses remain. I believe this is the closest thing to an objective sense of purpose that exists.
The relationship between sex and death is not oppositional, but cyclical. Every successful act of procreation is followed, inevitably, by death. We fear death intensely, yet seek solace in reproduction - a consolation that is ultimately futile, because death remains the only guaranteed outcome. In this sense, death is not separate from sex, but its consequence.
This painting holds both forces in a single image. The tongue is overtly sexual and initially alluring, but that seduction collapses once the wider context is revealed. Behind sex sits death. Behind desire sits inevitability.
There is an element of hedonism in that realisation. If death is unavoidable, then desire becomes defiant. Pleasure persists not because it saves us, but because it doesn’t. The work does not moralise this impulse. It simply acknowledges it.
The surrounding chaos reflects existence itself. Life, when reduced to its essentials, is disorder driven by appetite and fear. From that chaos, the figure emerges as both symbol and reminder: crowned, skeletal, exposed. Power, desire, decay, and continuation occupying the same space.
Ultimately, this painting suggests that all life is “sinning and songwriting” - driven by the desire to fuck and the fear of death. Everything else is decoration.