Jess Valice, Human, 2022

This poster, featuring Jess Valice’s ‘Resurrection’ (2022), was produced for the artist’s 2022 solo exhibition ‘Human’ with Carl Kostyál in London. In Jess Valice’s paintings, it’s usually the eyes you notice first. Huge, heavy-lidded pools, resolute and weary, as if their owner had lately gone through something but was nevertheless holding on, engaging the world. But then, by contrast, there’s the ears: oversized, sometimes mismatched in colour and on occasion reddish, the artist deliberately clowning herself or her subjects. The who’s-who distinction is ambiguous; Valice’s portraits can look like near-dysmorphic caricatures of her own features, but even in double portraits, everyone she paints looks somewhat like her. Her cast of comic melancholics, then, at once shares a range of emotions—a generalised sadness, exhaustion, stoicism—while being aware that expressing uncut melancholy (and fixating on the self, even in a confessional age) can itself be a quick turnoff for others. And that, conversely, humour, self-deprecation and absurdism are ways to keep a viewer with you, as they find out that the work is relatable not just to its maker but to themselves.

Year: 2022
Size:16.5 x 23.4 inches (42.0 x 59.4 cm)
Framed: Sold unframed