Jamian Juliano-Villani
Go Question ? Vol II, 2023
Oil on canvas
248,9 × 223,5 cm
About the work
For Go Question ? Vol II (2023), Jamian Juliano-Villani takes a well-known image of Christ by Ernst Fuchs as her starting point.
She is drawn to his style and ideas, particularly his interest in spirituality, music and religion. Fuchs explored, among other subjects, the connections between Judaism and Christianity. This theme also informs Juliano-Villani's approach to the painting.
Here, she reinterprets the tradition of the religious altarpiece. Rather than rejecting that tradition, she uses it as a starting point to which she adds new, contemporary meanings.
She pays close attention to detail. According to the original text, decorative elements such as pearls evoke associations with artists including Jean Fouquet.
The way Christ is depicted is particularly important. Juliano-Villani is interested in an image of Christ that is not unambiguously male, but has a more androgynous appearance.
The traditional father figure remains recognisable but is subtly transformed. Small interventions give the figure a softer, more feminine and more playful appearance. Rather than seeming stern or judgemental, the figure becomes caring and supportive, more like a mother.
According to the text, this creates a sense of warmth, openness and inclusivity.
This approach reflects broader themes in Juliano-Villani's work. She explores consumer culture, social taboos and stereotypes concerning race, gender and society. Gender fluidity plays an important role in this.
For her paintings, she draws from an extensive personal image archive comprising books, magazines, photographs and material sourced from the internet. She combines techniques including acrylic paint, airbrush and oil paint, sometimes incorporating fragments from her own work or references to other artists. Cartoons are another important source of inspiration.
In Go Question ? Vol II, these different worlds come together. A traditional religious image is not erased but reconsidered from the perspective of contemporary ideas about spirituality, gender and digital visual culture.
Jamian Juliano-Villani
° 1987 in Newark, New Jersey. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
In her paintings, Juliano-Villani combines the long tradition of figurative painting with images drawn from contemporary visual culture. She draws on an exceptionally wide range of sources to create unsettling and evocative images.
Juliano-Villani grew up as the daughter of commercial screen printers and spent much of her childhood in her parents' factory. From an early age, she was therefore immersed in the popular print and visual culture of the 1990s and 2000s. She studied at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
During her studies, she was influenced by Rutgers University's historical connections to Fluxus, her classes with John Yau and Raphael Ortiz, and the Zimmerli Art Museum's collection of Soviet conceptual painting from the 1970s.
In 2013, she presented her first solo exhibition, Me, Myself and Jah, at Rawson Projects in New York. These early paintings already explored themes that would remain important throughout her oeuvre, including race, identity and appropriation, alongside her fascination with the accessible and democratic visual language of cartoons.