The Haunted Faces of Jess Valice Arrive at Almine Rech

The figurative painter, 27, lands her first solo show at the New York gallery. 

A figure with exaggerated hands and feet saunters against a Dalí-esque landscape. A woman donning an afterthought of a dress cradles a goldfish bowl, her eyes expressive but the bags under them more so. People with ears the size of their face. Women, perpetually unimpressed.

The figurative style of Jess Valice, a fast-rising Los Angeles–based artist making her Almine Rech solo debut (March 7–Apr. 20), has drifted in the five years she’s been working professionally. Sometimes her subjects’ exaggerated features swing towards Surrealism, only to swing back again towards more conventional Mannerist portraiture. What haven’t changed, however, are their expressions: stoic, impenetrable, flat.

“I think the exaggerated features I made in the past [explored] my interest in abstraction whilst being consistently focused on the figure. However, I still refuse to include facial expression,” Valice tells ARTnews.

Contradictorily, the emotionless expressions of Valice’s figures heightens the emotional freight of her work. Viewers tend to project their own narratives onto their vacant stares—and it’s precisely that projection which fascinates the artist. After her parents forbade her from pursuing art in college, Valice studied neuroscience at Santa Barbara City College instead, influenced by her grandmother’s battle with Parkinson’s and her own labyrinthine, convoluted dreams.

“My interest in the mind correlates to the interest I have in how people perceive images,” Valice says.

Valice was born in the San Fernando Valley, near Los Angeles, to a Jewish mother and Catholic father. She was raised Jewish but sometimes accompanied her father to mass, where she was haunted by iconography of Jesus’s crucifixion. The way that moment was depicted—Jesus fixing worshipers with a searing yet inscrutable gaze—shook Valice to her core.

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“The image of Jesus, with his still expression singling you out of the congregation, would place this tightness in my stomach,” she remembers. “[It] dictates the work I make today.”

An irrepressible doodler, Valice homed in on figurative art early. She eventually dropped out of Santa Barbara City College, unhappy with the lack of painting time left over between her studies. On a whim, she messaged the painter Canyon Castator on Instagram and asked to be his assistant.

“At the time, he was the only artist I knew in Los Angeles who seemed accessible. He posted a photo of an overflowing trash bin in his studio, and I told him I would help clean up his space if he taught me a few things about painting,” Valice says, laughing.

Within a few short years, Valice went from knocking at the door of Castator’s now-fabled Mohilef Studios in “really ugly overalls” (her words) to claiming her own studio in the same building.

“He’s an annoying older brother that won’t stop bugging me now,” Valice says of Castator.

But as a self-taught artist, Valice says she still prefers to “take the technicality out of” confronting a blank canvas, instead following her intuition. When she was just starting out, she read voraciously, her interests ranging from Caravaggio to Lucien Freud to Dana Schutz. She wanted to tell her story like those artists had.

“I approach the canvas with the knowledge that anything could happen. Nothing is premeditated aside from where my head is and what my interests are at that time,” Valice says.

For example, her Almine Rech solo debut catches Valice nodding to Buddhism: “Mara,” the show title, references a demon who tries to tempt the Buddha—and by extension all of humanity—away from enlightenment.

“I realized that Mara and everything it symbolizes is a part of the human experience that I not only attempt to portray in my work, but also attempt to avoid within myself,” Valice says.

The exhibition showcases 19 new works in total—11 paintings and eight drawings. All were created from June 2023 onwards, with the most recent completed in February.

Valice’s show at Almine Rech’s Upper East Side exhibition space is followed by another at the gallery’s Paris Matignon location next year.

Besides that, Valice is finally finding something hard to come by in the last five years: a bit of down time. “I would love to rope-swing into a lake,” she says.

Source: artnews.com