Artist: Jess Valice

Almine Rech Paris, Matignon presents Jess Valice's second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Jess(ica) Valice is a Los Angeles-based figurative painter recognized for her melancholic, big-eared, 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 the extreme subjectivity of content with sternly objective forms. 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.

— A full press release by Sarah Moroz, journalist and writer, will follow.