TAMO JUGELI

Made without the use of preparatory drawings or studies, Jugeli’s work is guided by instinct, each painting newly alive at the moment of its creation. Made in semi-discrete series that are organised by indices of time and place, the works here retain a familial relationship, a temporal and conceptual kinship that serves as a unifying factor. Charting feeling, impulse, and the artist’s instinctual understanding of composition, the paintings in each series are accomplices to one another, each of them indicating the specificity of the moment in which they were made. Gesturing towards perspective but never remaining there long, Jugeli’s paintings oscillate between pure abstraction and moments when seemingly familiar signifiers peak through. Here we imagine a cherry, an animal, the fleshy flash of a limb, Persephone’s pomegranate; each inference is a reminder of our own psychological need for symbolic order, our reliance of the scaffolds of language even when we are engaged in moments of pure visual pleasure.

Jugeli’s small-scale watercolors offer an apt foil for the physicality of her works on canvas. Gentle and semi-transparent, these paintings on wood panel amplify the Dionysian power of the deeply saturated Earthy hues she conjures in oil, while still retaining an echo of psychological complexity. The artist’s use of heavy frames here seems to imply both protection and self-containment, as though this body of work represents another world of internal moments that are quieter and perhaps more personal.

The artist’s choice to title this exhibition I’d do it all again references the mythological tale of Sisyphus, who, punished to an eternity of futility, is doomed to relive the same struggle over and over. Receding into what she calls the absurdity of perpetual creation, Jugeli finds jouissance in an impossible loop: how does one conjure the ineffable now of a moment that has passed as soon as it is recorded?