smoke the moon is thrilled to present Los Angeles-based painter Jessica Palermo’s first solo exhibition of paintings. The show is on view from September 27 – November 3, 2024. Please join us for an opening reception with the artist on Friday, September 27 from 6 – 8pm and an artist conversation at 2pm on Sunday, September 29.
Color possesses something larger than aura or personality in Palermo’s paintings. Her work is defined by and through color – paint and its attenuating qualities occupying a devotional realm. Color serves as the groundwork of this show: highlighter fuchsias, deep murky reds, pinks with youthful cupidity all intermingle, cut through with darker and cooler gem tones. The artist is generous with color, she possesses an understanding of it from a technical and emotional level. What results is an overpowering alive-ness to her paintings, one that buzzes with pigmentation and movement.
There is a persistent doubling inside Palermo’s paintings – interior frames appear in nearly all of her work. These frames, often rendered as stark, geometric delineations of space, push the viewer toward a disorienting vantage. The works in The Pull are awash with a brushy, musical beauty – a part of which is their interruption. Shifted horizons intrude on the established sight line. Her frames serve as doorways, thresholds presented and stepped over to see beyond.
Throughout Palermo’s work there is a current, a push and pull between the far away and the immediate, the memorial and the infinite. Her work gestures to something quite known and still infinite. Landscapes become fleshy, thick globs of color lying in repose on top of one another. Her work implies the artist’s hand; color has been pushed and prodded into its final point of rest. Abstraction and figuration are twin flames in The Pull, reminding the viewer that the two modes can be made within each other. This new suite of paintings feels both historied and very current, taking stylistic cues from the greats of impressionism, while re-imaging the imagistic plane.
The scenes in Palermo’s work occupy a liminal zone of intimacy: she often paints the natural in its most transitional moments. Washing shores, lilting flowers and hazily setting suns all animate her canvases. The absolute power of her paintings lies in their omniscient narration – they are both our memories and Palermo’s, moments built in the aftermath of a dream.
What a painting can do is indeterminate. A painting has a complicated relationship to time; inside a painting it is possible to experience both the passage of time and a single moment in time. A painting belongs both to the artist who made it and the eye that takes it in, changing the work and being changed by it. Paintings possess an airiness, an ability to be mobile that is contrary to their material formations. Palermo finds her footing in this airiness, her paintings serve both as a lamppost to memory and a herald of a new sky.