NEW YORK, NY.- Almine Rech New York, Upper East Side is presenting Mara, Jess Valice's first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from today to April 20, 2024. On the face of things, stoicism can look a lot like exhaustion. In fact, fatigue, with all its causes and variations, may be our modern-day version of stoicism. Or so we may surmise from spending time with Jess Valice’s portraits: the straight-ahead stare of large hooded eyes, the small tightly-closed mouths, and the massive yet contorted solidity of her figures convey both determination and resignation, poise and detachment. These figures remain resolutely silent in the face of any pain we may imagine them suffering—and we know, everybody hurts.
Over the past few years, during which time the self-taught painter has developed a distinctive stylistic consistency, Valice has homed in on what she’s called a vacancy of expression that is capacious enough to be a screen for projection and an ocean in which to get lost in thought. She depicts a kind of dazed waking dream state. Her subjects gaze assertively at us, connecting directly while embodying an essential aloneness and distance, perhaps a melancholy. Having come to painting from the field of biopsychology (also known as behavioral neuroscience, or the study of how the brain and nervous system determine behavior), Valice is drawn to representations of psychological opacity and blockage, replete with all the ineffable richness and complexity buried inside each person’s remote unknowability: “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.” Rather than a symptom of the organism’s failure, numbness is a psychological coping mechanism, a refuge, a recuperative state, and unlikely source of strength.
— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, curator and writer
Jess(ica) Valice is a Los Angeles-based figurative painter recognized for her melancholic, big-eared, and doe-eyed figures. Focussing on the human condition, Valice's oil paintings and charcoal or oil stick drawings explore the parables of the animalistic gaze. Her figurative works combine within one framework the romantic and the forlorn, the recognizable and mysterious, the religious and irreverent, and extreme subjectivity of content with forms sternly objective. The artist's interest stems from her childhood negligence of religious involvement, yet instant attraction to the liturgical artwork adorned in places of worship. Valice’s figures share similar features to the face and body of the artist with seemingly uncomfortable or exhausted bearings in sometimes congenial environments.
Born in 1996 in Los Angeles, California, Valice studied art in grade school but went on to pursue an education in neuroscience at Santa Barbara City College (SBCC). After three years into her education, she decided to end her path in science to pursue painting.
Almine Rech
Jess Valice: Mara
March 7 — Apr 20, 2024
Opening on Thursday, March 7, 2024 from 6 to 8 pm
