Jo Dennis: A glass of Absinthe

JO-HS cdmx is pleased to announce our next exhibition JO DENNIS ‘A glass of Absinthe’ curated by Elisa Carola opening February 4 and on view until March 29.

Jo Dennis’ works are profoundly anchored in the fabric of life. Her paintings pull back and forth between physical experience and a more subconscious and transcendental memorial dimension in which an image can manifest. Dennis often integrates everyday elements into her works, anchoring them once again in a material realm of actual experience. The traces left on the surface become remnants of past events and occasions for ruminations on something already absent or lost. Layer after layer, a dense stratification of marks and gestures accumulates intuitively on used military tent fabrics. Chosen as a substrate for its relation to the body, their materiality transforms the painting process into a powerful metaphor for the layering of sensations, emotions, and memories that determine our experience of the world.

In this way, embodying a temporal and experimental dimension, Dennis’s works become a kind of diary that reflects the complex interplay between physical actions and psychological reactions that shape our existential experience.

Building on the Cubist and Dadaist pioneering inclusion of ordinary objects into artworks to integrate the abstraction of painterly gestures, Dennis delves into the relationship between human stories and material culture, all while threading them into the continuum of art history. The title of the show, Glass of Absinthe, draws directly from Picasso’s homonymous sculpture, in which the artist included a real absinthe spoon nestled between the modeled bronze sugar cube and glass. Viscerally sensuous and highly evocative, Dennis’s dense, tactile meditations ultimately become embodiments of real-life experiences, embracing a notion of materiality that transcends its direct physical presence to include all the experiential, memorial, and cultural meanings embedded within the painting.