James Fuentes announces Julia Jo: Point of No Return, an exhibit comprising a series of new large-scale paintings that mark the artist’s first West Coast solo exhibition and first with the gallery.
Julia Jo embarks on each work from a deeply intimate space, depicting relatable memories, narratives, and passions from her personal life: love triangles, feelings of jealousy, pressures of gender performance, family tension, interactions with strangers, positions of passive observation, and awkward encounters. Taking into account the ways we interpret body language and articulate feeling between one another, Jo’s work offers a visual territory wherein parameters of physiology and sociology are cut loose. Forms swallow and in the same movement are swallowed; human or animal limbs and faces appear then recede within swirling hallucinations; and echoes of an imagined or original composition reach back into the foreground. Herein, Jo gives her audience space to bring their own natural associations to the image, just as she encourages the natural dripping and layering of oil paint as she steps back to observe and unearth the subtle details of these figures within the studio. Developing multiple canvases simultaneously, Jo is in orbit with her body of work, dilating the thoroughfares between each piece as she perambulates through the studio.
Stepping beyond the present, Jo’s fields of expressive and exact brushstrokes speak to the historic realm of painting as picture-making itself. These works dance between the allegorical and unreadable against potentially aerial, flattened, and perspectival readings of space—signaling the work of J. M. W. Turner or Peter Paul Rubens in the same breath as Joan Mitchell, Chaim Soutine, or Cecily Brown.
Moving frequently throughout her childhood, Jo became fluent in the expected behaviors that come with adapting to a new environment, quietly observing body language and mirroring social queues. But in her work she resists this etiquette, unleashing feeling to let it run wild. Jo dissolves any barrier between a physical and emotional interior, seeking to amplify the social scenes portrayed by art history’s forebears, meanwhile defiantly disregarding the missing piece that might complete the jigsaw puzzle.
It is these capricious conditions that govern the universe charted across Jo’s paintings; the distinct challenge of a panel in squared proportion at odds with the tangle of arms and legs that it contains. Jo’s communication with her canvas is perpetual; a pendulum swaying from figuration to abstraction. Her practice breathes and constricts, hints-at and conceals, beckons and retreats ad infinitum.
James Fuentes | 5015 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles
On View June 24-July 22, 2023
Opening June 24, 2023 | 6-8PM
