OPENING RECEPTION: MARCH 2ND, 6-8PM

MARCH 2ND - 25TH, 2023

Auxier Kline is pleased to present the debut solo exhibition by J. Carino, Genesis, featuring a survey of new paintings created by the California based artist specifically for the exhibition.

J. CARINO ARTIST STATEMENT: 

Born and raised in Colorado, I grew up surrounded by nature, and a large part of my work is a personal reclamation of nature as part of my identity as a gay man. My work explores ideas of queerness, identity, and sensuality, and how those concepts relate to the natural world through monumental figures and richly colored and patterned landscapes and flora.

Queer people are rarely afforded the luxury of "permanence" in society, and are viewed by many as "unnatural." I contrast this idea with sensual queer figures incorporated into landscapes evoking eternity. Throughout the work, there are symbols of different scales of time: ephemeral wildflowers, trees and agave that can live as long or longer than people, and the eternal as represented by mountains and stones. The paintings express the idea that there is a “naturalness” to nudity, to sexuality, and to queerness that is as elemental a component of the landscape as rocks and trees. I incorporate the landscapes, flora, and fauna of my childhood in Colorado and current home in California and reimagine them into dreamlike edens populated by liberated, sensual queer figures. Through a mixture of self-portraiture and drawings of my husband, friends, and models, the bodies and faces undulate through the mountainous landscapes with the generative forces of forests and plate tectonics.

This body of work references mythology and religious symbolism as a way to re-contextualize ideas of creation, fertility, and transcendence within a queer framework. Public perceptions of queer life often only focus on death and disease, or, alternatively, on desexualized narratives. In my paintings, I want the queer inhabitants to enter spaces where healing exists alongside death and where queer sex exists alongside beauty and life. Creation myths and gay cruising culture can exist in the same world. Influenced by medieval tapestry, I surround the figures with flowers and plants associated with medicine and healing that become jewel-like and reminiscent of millefiori glass. Referencing colorists like Matisse, Bonnard, and Redon, I am interested in the way that color can suspend and enhance reality in an almost spiritual way, and how that influences our perception of the natural world. I want my work to feel like a heightened reality, where magic is still visible.