Each and every day we observe thousands of faces online and in person. And with each and every one, we reflexively look for clues to determine how they must feel. It is an empathic impulse endemic to us as social creatures. And yet, regardless of our perpetual, involuntary efforts, we can never be sure that we’ve ascertained any level of truth. It’s this mystery that lies at the heart of Jess Valice’s painted figures. The artist’s initial life path, which was headed toward a medical practice, laid the foundation for an approach to painting that leaves the viewer in a state of quizzical study, lost in the gaze of a subject who was never asking to be diagnosed. The predominant demons and desires of her subjects even seem to elude Valice, as she finds herself reworking each of their faces incessantly until she lands on something that feels honest. For her solo exhibition, Mara, opening today at Almine Rech’s Upper East Side gallery in New York, the subjects in question are at various points of overcoming the part of their egos that obstruct the path to enlightenment, known in Buddhism as Mara. According to Valice, “There is this overwhelming sense of fatigue that I think is typifying our generation, the weight of a spectrum of emotional responses that digital space provokes in us every day… It’s all so complex—this is where the science and melancholia come in—the recognition of this blankness as a widespread response. It’s too much to feel.” Fellow painter and confidante Avery Wheless joined Valice in her studio as the paintings were nearly finished to delve into the making of this new body of work and demystify some of the je ne sais quoi embodied by Valice’s disaffected figures. Read more.
Leelee Kimmel: Nuwar @ Almine Rech Gallery in Paris
Almine Rech Paris presents Nuwar, Leelee Kimmel’s first exhibition with the gallery. Leelee Kimmel’s paintings are investigations of inner and outer space, collisions between ur-ancient, chthonic nature and the hyper-sophisticated realm of Modernist and postmodernist art histories, between the preverbal and the phantasmagoria of the library, terse and voluble, suddenly laughing then stonily silent. Kimmel’s abstract biomorphs skitter through pitch black abyssal depths, like those of Beebe’s Arcturus Adventure, at once terrifying and comic. The shapes harken back to nature, while Kimmel’s palette is neon and acid, resoundingly anti-naturalistic.
There’s a sense of potential catastrophe crowding the margins, as forms coil and ricochet through darkness: is that a turtle or a hand grenade revolving on the periphery, is that polyp a gun? Transformation is the guiding formal but also psychological and dare I say spiritual governing force in Kimmel’s dark glittering universe, fearsome and newborn, cunning monsters, mutants, aliens, explorers, invaders, these phantoms of Nuwar.
Nuwar is on view through July 27 at Almine Rech Gallery 64 Rue de Turenne 75003 Paris FR. photographs courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech