Considered by many to be the epitomy of the British Pop artist, the fundamental concerns of Allen Jones have remained the figure, and the fusion of representational form. Often mixing different language systems within a single painting, his paintings play on the disparity between the illusion of the image and its substance as paint.
In The Parachutist 1963, one of a series made in the early sixties, the plunging speed of the parachutist acts as a sexual metaphor. Despite the title, it is not clear whether there is one figure falling, or if the jumbled legs represent two figures entangled together.
An admirer of Delaunay and Kandinsky, Jones uses colour in his work to convey a multiplicity of ideas. Here the vibrant and discordant colours he employs, reinforce the dynamic (sexual) energy of the subject. The visual interplay of the bright coloured bands of the parachute, creates an illusion of spatial depth in the picture plane. At the same time these bands refer to a symbolic world outside of the picture, where depth is represented by the coloured contour lines of maps.
This series of paintings shows Jones’s obvious aesthetic enjoyment of the multicoloured parachute. The spiral coloured shape echoes motifs of bus wheels, striped clothing and medals seen in other paintings. These shapes appear repeatedly, morphing from one context to another, operating sometimes as abstract forms and at other times appearing as recognisable figurative elements.