Julia Jo Paints at the Threshold of Emotion and Psychical Presence

Julia Jo’s paintings have long inhabited a precarious yet evocative space between figuration and abstraction. Her feathery brushstrokes sweep across the canvas, tracing multiple possible images while leaving the final composition deliberately open—a field where colors and energies are in constant motion, ready to shift into new metaphorical forms. The Brooklyn-based, South Korean-born artist emerged during the pandemic, quickly becoming a collector favorite with long waiting lists. Institutional interest followed just as rapidly, bringing her work into prominent collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and Smith College Museum of Art.

In her latest exhibition “Beckon” at Charles Moffett, the Brooklyn-based, South Korean-born artist presents an enveloping choreography of 15 new paintings, all on her signature square canvases, that unfolds as a sensorial and imaginative portal capable of reactivating the mythmaking potential that has long defined the medium. A successful painting needs to have this physical and emotional presence, Jo tells Observer as we tour the show. “When you walk into a room, and someone is standing quietly in the corner, you immediately feel that they’re there. A painting can do the same,” she says.

Jo’s paintings carry this specific, resonant and often almost epic presence as they unfold in space, encouraging the viewer to enter a dialogue—or perhaps even a dance—with them. Each canvas appears both as a character and a universe in itself, some more earthbound and contained, others more celestial, depending on the vibrant palette and bold gradient scales animating their surfaces. Jo describes them as performative. “I always want to honor the paint, as in the performance of paint,” she says. “I want the painting to perform for you.”

When confronting the white canvas, Jo traces the silhouettes of some recognizable scene: a dinner party, a charged encounter or even something mythic, like two Olympian heroes in confrontation. From that initial structure, however, she enters an immediate negotiation between figure and color, guided by her belief that color is the primary vehicle through which a painting establishes its beauty, presence and emotional connection. Very quickly, she begins to relinquish that clarity, allowing the image to move toward loss. “There’s an early dialogue between figure and color, and then I begin to let the image move toward loss—to become more indirect, to dissolve and loosen its clarity.”

Yet while in the past one could still sense these interlacings of bodies, intricately woven through gestures and movements as part of the painterly fabric itself, in these new paintings the brushwork has become even looser, delivering only notes of sensation and allowing any final referent to slip behind the force of this whirlwind of vital energies, matter in pure transformation.

Color is her true protagonist—not an object property or subject but an event that happens between body and world. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s famous line, “Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet,” Jo reflects on how color establishes an immediate and deeply personal connection, one that precedes language and operates at a more instinctual level: “We all have that immediate connection, and also a deeply intimate, personal relationship with color. Color reaches us long before we can translate those sensations into elegant words. It becomes a kind of one-on-one relationship. It’s difficult to articulate, but certain color combinations might feel too violent or overwhelming to someone because of their own life experiences.” That is what Jo finds particularly fascinating, though she also admits that this relationship can never be fully controlled or universally shared. “It also means I have to accept that I will never be able to communicate something in a purely one-to-one way.” This realization has led her to accept that painting cannot communicate in a fixed, singular way but instead remains open, allowing meaning to emerge differently for each viewer.

Color acts directly on the nervous system, writes Gilles Deleuze in his treatise on Francis Bacon: color is already a pure sensation that bypasses narrative and representation, producing direct affect. Escaping any possible identification, Jo’s painterly brushstrokes dance through space and expand almost musically through their movements, drawing the viewer into an almost hypnotic aesthetic experience that resists descriptive or narrative interpretation yet leaves behind a precise emotional resonance, much like a musical composition. “It could be the same figure across all these works, or perhaps they’re just glimpses. I see them as physical embodiments of an emotional note,” Jo explains.

“I want to abandon the narrative somehow, so that I can create room for a brand new narrative to emerge,” she adds. “Painting, especially, is perfectly suited to that. It functions as a language, as a communication tool. We are such visual beings, and we’re so quick to register images. Now more than ever, we have access to this entire image bank, from the earliest cave paintings onward.”

There is no fixed point in these new canvases, only a sinuous swirling of forms and lines that remain open to multifaceted emotional possibilities and poetic interpretations as they interact with the heritage of visual and symbolic memory each viewer carries within. Her dizzying compositions simultaneously reveal and conceal forms, mirroring the emotional ambiguity and interpersonal uncertainty that characterize our daily encounters with “the other,” the ongoing dialogue between inner and outer worlds that shapes our existence.

Echoing James Hillman, color becomes psychical material, the psyche made visible in canvases capable of carrying soul knowledge. Jo’s paintings exist in that in-between space—between mind and body, between spirit and matter—disrupting the inherited dualism of the Cartesian divide to suggest a more fluid, symbiotic existence, one that abstract painting uniquely allows us to access beyond the containment of language and other systems of knowledge that have historically sought to separate the two.

“I find that much more liberating—the idea that maybe it isn’t about what the painting is, but about what it isn’t. It’s about transcending the self and moving toward something more universal, almost like an erasure of visible identity,” she reflects. “When those markers fall away, the painting gains an undeniable presence. It becomes an open field.”

The title is the last thing she adds, only when she already feels the painting can finally speak for itself. “I want to create an entry point from a certain angle, but still leave space for the viewer to explore,” she explains, describing titles as a glimpse into the painting’s narrative that helps set the tone and offer a particular viewpoint. “I never want to give too much away, because that openness allows for miscommunication, for loss of information, and for something new to emerge.”

As she notes, by dissolving stable structures and resisting fixed meaning, she creates space for viewers to project their own narratives and emotional associations onto the work. The painting does not dictate interpretation but invites participation, allowing meaning to emerge through the encounter. In relinquishing control over narrative, she enables the work to function as a shared psychological and perceptual space where presence takes precedence over representation and where the viewer becomes an active participant in the formation of meaning through the alchemical force of paint. “When you first encounter the painting, it feels expansive, open. But once you really take it in, once you absorb it, it becomes much more intimate. For me, each painting feels like it touches a piece of my soul.”

Julia Jo is part of a wave of Millennial painters revitalizing gestural figuration, positioned between emotional abstraction and fractured narrative while revaluing, through painting, the embodied expression of sensation and emotion, likely also as a response to an increasingly digitalized and alienated world. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han has argued, contemporary life is marked by a progressive erosion of presence as experience becomes mediated, accelerated and abstracted into information. In contrast, painting restores what Han describes as the “aura of presence,” reintroducing friction, opacity and duration into perception. The physical act of painting—its resistance and unpredictability—becomes a form of counterpractice, reactivating sensory and affective dimensions of experience that cannot be fully translated into language or data.

Julia Jo’s personal experience adds another layer to these interferences between realms of experience and meaning. As a young South Korean moving to the U.S. early for her studies, she experienced firsthand what she describes as “the limits of human connection,” the limits of communication and understanding across cultures and languages. These moments lost in translation prompted her to seek a more universal emotional language capable of transcending those barriers.

In this sense, Jo’s abstraction becomes a means of accessing a more spontaneous and intuitive form of myth-making—not to define or fix meaning but to evoke fleeting glimpses of what remains fundamentally untamable: the essential condition of our existence as embodied beings moving within a larger cosmic order. Her paintings do not illustrate myth so much as reactivate its generative function, allowing images to emerge organically from emotional and perceptual experience rather than from inherited symbolic systems. Jo’s abstraction activates mythic imagination—the innate human capacity to translate the invisible forces shaping our inner and outer worlds into sensuous, embodied form.

As she explains, mythology has always relied on the human figure to give presence to what would otherwise remain inaccessible. “Throughout mythology, we’ve given the divine an image—a human form, a human physicality. There’s something about translating what is obscure and untouchable into the human body,” she says. Her paintings inhabit precisely this threshold, where the visible and invisible converge. Figures surface and dissolve, never fully fixed, as if carrying traces of forces larger than themselves. In this way, her work does not impose meaning but allows it to arise, creating spaces where the natural and spiritual, the psychological and the cosmic briefly align.

At a time when collective mythic consciousness often feels suppressed by accelerated technological logic and algorithm-driven alienation and personalization, her paintings gesture toward—and actively encourage—that deeper imaginative faculty capable of restoring continuity between the individual psyche and the broader rhythms of existence, expanding our understanding of what it means to inhabit a body and a world in constant transformation.

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