‘Artforum seriousness meets Carry On Painting in Jason Brooks's satire on 80’s appropriation, only appropriating from painted images that have already been appropriated. The result is degradation and pleasure. For isn't any attempt to merge high and low essentially carnivalesque? As tragedy becomes comedy and comedy turns into farce, degradation takes the form of wholehearted embrace, displaying what we have in common. Sex, after all, is a great equaliser, and Trojan, the title of the painting, is not only a Greek hero but also a humble condom.’

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‘Artforum seriousness meets Carry On Painting in Jason Brooks's satire on 80’s appropriation, only appropriating from painted images that have already been appropriated. The result is degradation and pleasure. For isn't any attempt to merge high and low essentially carnivalesque? As tragedy becomes comedy and comedy turns into farce, degradation takes the form of wholehearted embrace, displaying what we have in common. Sex, after all, is a great equaliser, and Trojan, the title of the painting, is not only a Greek hero but also a humble condom.’

‘ Schizophrenics of the world unite. Bring together all those old marginalised practices from art history and party on the canvas. Invite whoever you like. Artists are not isolated individuals, but a mass of identities. Jason Brooks’s paintings are texts in which similarities, difference, inconsistencies and defacements articulate the fact that only in the face of an absent singular self can one achieve desire. Without desire there is only complacency and boredom, neither of which Brooks can be accused of. In a consumer led society desire is always that which is out of reach. The ego is made schizophrenic by the desire to be always other than that which it is. Desire is manifold, complex and opposed. Brooks’s paintings jerk this desiring machine into schizophrenic activity. He is not part of the 80s authorship debate: that work has been done by others. Brooks is part of a generation without an heroic stylistic formula to fall back on. He appropriates art historical motifs and swallows them like a drug, both as a means to forget and as a stimulant to enable him to go further. It is the effect that art has on Brook’s mind and body that we are given in his work. Salle, Scharf, Taaffe and Kippenberger, to mention a few, construct a contemporary history. These are bastardised paintings – being of unknown parents – but we can guess who he has slept with. The body of work that Brooks is steadily accumulating shows a desire to reconstruct a schizoid self out of the remains of a society that has championed the singular heroic self.' - Glen Brown -

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‘ Schizophrenics of the world unite. Bring together all those old marginalised practices from art history and party on the canvas. Invite whoever you like. Artists are not isolated individuals, but a mass of identities. Jason Brooks’s paintings are texts in which similarities, difference, inconsistencies and defacements articulate the fact that only in the face of an absent singular self can one achieve desire. Without desire there is only complacency and boredom, neither of which Brooks can be accused of. In a consumer led society desire is always that which is out of reach. The ego is made schizophrenic by the desire to be always other than that which it is. Desire is manifold, complex and opposed. Brooks’s paintings jerk this desiring machine into schizophrenic activity. He is not part of the 80s authorship debate: that work has been done by others. Brooks is part of a generation without an heroic stylistic formula to fall back on. He appropriates art historical motifs and swallows them like a drug, both as a means to forget and as a stimulant to enable him to go further. It is the effect that art has on Brook’s mind and body that we are given in his work. Salle, Scharf, Taaffe and Kippenberger, to mention a few, construct a contemporary history. These are bastardised paintings – being of unknown parents – but we can guess who he has slept with. The body of work that Brooks is steadily accumulating shows a desire to reconstruct a schizoid self out of the remains of a society that has championed the singular heroic self.' - Glen Brown -