Julia Jo: Torrent
Charles Moffett is pleased to present Torrent, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based, South Korean-born artist Julia Jo. This marks the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery, following her New York City solo debut nearly two years ago, and comes on the heels of significant institutional support for her practice with recent acquisitions by the High Museum of Art and ICA Miami. The exhibition spans both of the gallery's Tribeca spaces; with the ground floor of 431 Washington Street dedicated to a new series of the artist's large-scale square paintings, and the second floor of 437 Washington Street showcasing the artist's work on intimately-scaled canvases.
Compositionally, Jo's new paintings further evolve the artist's excavation of the emotional possibilities inherent in the oscillation between the figurative and the abstract. Taking inspiration from memories of her own interpersonal misconnections, Jo begins each painting by sketching a largely figurative composition in oil directly onto the canvas. The artist approaches this original phase as "drawing in paint." The forms most often comprise exaggerated bodies immersed in heightened human relationships of all manners - amorous, hostile, familial, fraught. Yet with each new layer of oil paint, Jo obscures, fractures, and reconstitutes the picture facing her, elevating the final compositions beyond her personal narrative to a higher plane of universal human emotion.
Across the exhibition, one witnesses Jo pushing herself materially and formally into new territories. All of the paintings across the full range of scales in the show are painted on white primed linen canvases, a return from the artist's recent use of clear primed canvases and a choice that enlivens the compositions with a palpable brilliance and vibrancy. New for this series, Jo integrates oil pastels and oil sticks with her traditional material of oil paint. The incorporation of the pastels and sticks, which lend themselves naturally to the calligraphic motions of the artist's hand, allow the dynamism and fluidity of her mark-making to exist throughout the layers of her compositions; not simply as a sketched foundation or a surface adornment, but rather in equal and direct conversation with the paint. Ultimately, for Jo, the figuration that slips in and out of sight serves as equal a formal purpose as a narrative one. Bodies that evolve through abstraction into a language of paint become analogous with any other mark on the canvas, simultaneously building and collapsing, familiar yet never frozen.
Echoes resonate between the artist's creation of her paintings and the viewer's final experience of them. Jo always works on multiple canvases at once across a range of scales. The process demands that she move constantly throughout her studio, forward to paint and backward to absorb, shifting side to side from one painting to the next. She approaches and considers her works from every conceivable angle, allowing them the space to not only speak back to her but to converse with one another as well. Likewise, the engagement of Jo's paintings compells the viewer to move their body and gaze continuously. Only through physical motion can one begin to glean the forms at play within the paintings' layers. A clenched fist, a screaming mouth, an arched chest, a wide-eyed stare only reveal themselves over extended looking from every vantage point, the paintings offering a seemingly endless supply of visual surprise.
There is no stillness in the experience of Jo's paintings. These are not quiet pictures. The exhibition's title "torrent" encapsulates that chaos - the artist's embrace of the loud in life and her expression of the full emotional potency of painting. She presents her works as a testament to the parallels between the earth-altering strength of a storm and the often invisible but all-powerful formidability of emotions, both possessing the capabilities to alter our view of the world around us, to eradicate what came before, and to mold a new, unknowable state of being.
Julia Jo's (b. 1991, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. MFA Parsons School of Design 2019, BFA Smith College, 2016) practice encompasses a distinctive style of oil painting that incorporates a vibrant color palette to render compositions that shift between the figurative and the abstract. While born in Seoul, Jo spent her childhood and adolescence moving between South Korea and states across the U.S.; and she draws upon a deep, personal well of moments lost in translation, social miscues and interpersonal distance to inspire her practice. Her paintings are grounded in the self-doubt, conflict, and misunderstanding that can subsume any relationship, with human forms and familiar objects dynamically rendered through careful line, color, and shadow to simultaneously reveal and conceal. Jo has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Charles Moffett, New York, NY, James Fuentes, Los Angeles, CA, and Jessican Silverman, San Francisco, CA. In the fall of 2023, she participated in the esteemed Beecher Residency in Litchfield, CT. Her work is in the permanent collections of ICA Miami and the High Museum of Art.
