Aron John Dubois (b. 1989)
Aron John Dubois (b. 1989, Boulder, CO) is a painter and an internationally recognized tattoo artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With no formal arts education after high school, Dubois has honed his craft by meticulous study and self-directed practice. His tattoo and fine art work both predominantly address the enigma of nature, corporeality, and archetypal drama through a lens influenced by art brut, folk mysticism, anthropology, and the grotesque. While his tattoo work has garnered much acclaim over the 10+ years he has worked in the industry, Dubois is an outsider to the contemporary art world more broadly. He presented his first solo exhibition in August 2021 at The Valley, as well as his first art fair presentation in December 2021 at NADA Miami. Dubois continues to maintain a tattoo practice alongside his work in the studio with painting, ceramics, and other media, and will present a second solo exhibition at The Valley in September 2023.
Working primarily on paper media with layered watercolor, ink, and gouache, Dubois creates compositions dense with symbolic language born of his own mythology and spiritual inquiry. He prefers working on paper because of its accessibility, ephemerality, and impermanence; and enjoys how paper can feel much like an artifact when displayed behind glass. Initially, his drawing style arose from his experience in drafting tattoo designs; images existing in decorative rather than illusory space, recalling flash pages common in tattoo practices. As his work has continued to develop, the compositions began to move away from the language of flash, often taking on the form of tablets emblazoned with glyphs. These compositions resemble uncanny fusions of symbols or subjects akin to riddles or puzzles, and narrate anthropomorphic or unconscious neuro-cellular perceptions. To Dubois, the most important task of the artist is to make the spirit visible. He personally endeavors this by exploring the tension between the corporeal body and spiritual longing in the compositions he creates, examining a path to spiritual growth shown to human beings through communing with the cycles inherent in nature.
For our presentation at Outsider Art Fair, Dubois has created a series of over thirty new works on paper which meditate on the winter and spring seasons, and the transitional times between. For the artist, this time of stillness, isolation, and interiority begets a continued introspection on personal archetypes and cycles of birth and death. Tracing the disappearance and re-emergence of nature, Dubois explores the deep connection between the human psyche and the landscape we inhabit.
