JESS VALICE – MARA
2024-02-26Valice’s people tend to fill the frames in which they are pictured, often cramped or bent to fit within her canvases, which are scaled to or larger than life. Their environments are characteristically austere and mundane, frequently monochromatic. Her aesthetic updates Social Realism of the last century, imbuing attractive Gen Z and Millenial subjects, posed with nonchalant savvy, with the monumentality and heroic grit of a figure like Fougeron’s working class wife in Return from the Market (1953). There are painted elements in her growing body of work reminiscent of Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, Nicole Eisenman and Yoshitomo Nara. While vibrant color may occur—a lurid tangerine or bright blue background over here, a pair of strawberry red ears back there—they are exceptions to what is generally a subdued and sedate palette of dirtied, grayed, and yellowed hues: earthy, warm, and impoverished. Light and shadow, as they articulate fleshy mass, is generally amped up and slicked for seductive appeal. Her proportions are selectively exaggerating to Mannerist extremes, demonstrating a fondness for oversized hands and feet with digits swollen like floppy sausages or engorged tumors.
Opposite – Ally, 2024
Exhibition runs through to April 20th, 2024
Almine Rech
39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor
NY 10075
New York
