Queensway Area Guide

Cris Contini Contemporary London concludes a successful year with a solo exhibition by German artist Jens Hesse, Glitch & Glamour: Perfectly Imperfect. The show celebrates Hesse’s distinctive painterly language, where the precision of digital aesthetics meets the sensual imperfection of tactile surfaces. His works unfold in the space between these poles, translating the technical errors of our media-saturated era into gestures of painterly intimacy. A former fashion designer, Hesse approaches painting as both fabric and image. The surface — sometimes corduroy, sometimes bouclé — is never neutral; it recalls texture, touch, and wear. These tactile foundations become the site where the “glitch” appears: not as a mistake, but as a revelation. What the screen hides behind its promise of seamless perfection, Hesse reveals through brushstrokes, layering, and distortion. His portraits and figurative scenes seem at once familiar and disturbed. Pixels bleed into brush marks; compression lines cut across faces; digital interference coexists with the softness of oil and textile fibers. These works do not imitate technology — they expose its fragility. By transforming visual defects into painterly language, Hesse reclaims the human presence within the technological gaze. The exhibition’s title, Glitch & Glamour, evokes this duality. “Glamour” — the polished image, the seductive surface — meets “glitch”, the breakdown that disrupts illusion. Hesse situates beauty within the fault line between these states. In doing so, he reminds us that imperfection is not the opposite of glamour but its hidden core: the shimmer that occurs precisely when control falters. In an age obsessed with clarity, correction, and resolution, Hesse’s paintings invite us to dwell in ambiguity. They ask us to look again — not for perfection, but for presence. Within the glitch, we find the trace of the hand, the residue of the body, the persistence of the real. Perfectly imperfect.