56 (J. Carino). PM/AM at 37 Eastcastle Street. July 2024 (wo)

Expressively depicted bodies, alone or entwined, and vivid natural environments at various scales of perspective are the primary components of a typical J Carino painting. These elements combine to illustrate a desire for the artist to reclaim space, in abstract and more literal senses, and to tip a balance of scales from invalidation towards acceptance and visibility.

He sees our natural environment for its immediate beauty and intensity, an arena for the dramas of the plant, animal, atmospheric and cosmic worlds to play out. What identifies and characterises these scenarios as dramatic, is us. Humans create and destroy beauty; we wield violence as a pre-meditated force that can be controlled and amplified. The target for much of our misguided violence has historically been ourselves and our planet. We have drawn lines between people, and between us and our world.

Through the portrayal of nude subjects representing queerness, sexual freedom and liberation, the overarching intent behind J Carino’s work is to criticise divisions, addressing and ultimately reverting a history of marginalisation based on a person’s gender and sexuality. The robustness and defiance woven into this objective transmutes into the figures’ composition—their physicality suggests a certain strength, and in more adventurous works bodies are exaggerated beyond what is possible in reality. In these cases the mind is taken to a mythological world where human forms are malleable, a mere basis for numerous physical iterations associated with folkloric tradition—perhaps the bergrisar (mountain giants) of Norse mythology, and the titans described in Ancient Greek texts.

The supernatural aspects of the work pervade both subject and landscape, creating a beguiling metaphysical symbiosis of sorts and elevating the work to a transcendental plane. A body’ essence becomes the landscape itself, shoulders seamlessly blending with mountains. This concept is manifest in beings that seem super charged, almost supernatural. He invokes our auratic selves, the spheres of our existence that exist around and at a distance from our bodies, intersecting us with what is around us. The eyes on a fallen branch in a forest see out from within, but only as we recognise its sentience with our own; a voyeuristic exchange that has played out for thousands of years.

A striking feature of the work is how this history is told. Harmonised with their surroundings, the figures only appear as individuals for a brief moment, before the edges soften and we come to understand that they more universally represent humans, queer humans. Queer is itself a reclaimed term, and in its fullness of presence that stands up to the violence of marginalisation, the work activates its reclamation of space, of the natural world. The tension of the subject matter is countered by the verdant lushness of the painting, celebrating the awakening in our more progressive societies, a sense of fertility and abundance. The work’s questioning of heteronormative tradition terraforms a social landscape which extends vitality towards utopia.

J Carino grew up in the wide, wild expanses of Colorado, and across his painting career this influence is clear to see. Painting in London frames the work within a heavily contrasting sociopolitical topography, that of accessible, public space at odds with the industrialised and commercialised city. Here nature is contained between roads and buildings, between determined categories of ‘appropriate’ uses of space. London’s green spaces are typically cultivated landscapes, a place where in warmer months the city’s residents will reveal flesh most extensively, a restriction of nature as a setting for a conversely unrestricted expression of humanity.

J Carino’s paintings are initially based on drawings of himself, models, and friends. Compared to a photograph, which forms an immediate restriction on the imagination, drawing allows for more free expression, forms can be exaggerated at the point of inception and colour palettes have no pre-ordained, formalised guidance. Rather than situating his paintings exclusively in lofty scenarios whose reverence pushes them into an incomprehensible esoterica, he adopts techniques that anchor them to solid ground. Dirt and grit contribute a natural patina to the surfaces of flora and skin, bringing them together in a more discernible reality.

We exist at a time when the discussion of gender and sexuality spectra is more platformed. J Carino takes this and widens the scope, positing the interesting concept of a spectrum between human and environment—where do we end and where does our environment begin? It is a reminder that we are all products of the natural environment, regardless of who and what we are, and despite various fascistic fantasies and unbelievable tragedies of legislation, this plain truth is impossible to refute.

Daniel Mackenzie
June 2024