Bruxelles

contact: julieosko@hotmail.com

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« Julie Osko’s work predominantly uses “Mine De Plomb” (black lead) as the title for her drawings, leaving a greater void on any interpretive restraint to the imagery. At the same time it pronounces its base materialism – lead – devoid of luxury, there is an anti decadence achieved through the excessive process of rendering images through the body to paper, a horror vacui of visual organization. This, coupled with the imagery depicting bodies deformed, lacerated, constrained and decorated within the bounds of the composition amplify the indistinguishable qualities of landscape and those that populate it, landscape sublimating the latter into its objectness. A tension subsumes the viewer with a reverence to monument, a feeling of being over- whelmed and dwarfed, to a series of hellscapes forming new compositions while regurgitating excerpts of historical paintings or partially deciphered themes of violence reproduced through the artist’s hand.

An entirety/a whole/a composition is suggested through the uniformity of the medium of lead on paper, while the imagery seems to reject its combinations and organizations of visual information as much as the deformities and degradations depicted. A brand of the “real surreal”, Bataille’s essay on the big toe etc etc etc, amplified, a black hole vacuum of trumpets blasting in reverse, over enunciated, placed as “a cathedral over” one’s psychic wellbeing. To reiterate the contrast of our titles, the lack of any elaborated verbal description apart from materials used, creates a greater sense of horror, a lack of guide, to be left in a realm of nonknowledge. Where Francis Bacon dealt with containment and isolation, Osko’s work creates a greater unease of being, unable to discern where one’s own being can be separated from its current location in geographic time and place. For the viewer there is a self conscious questioning of autonomy, evoking a psychic desperation to define what separates one from what repulses, predominating Osko’s drawing compositions. The unease of this inseparable attachment to time and place, the breaking of the delusion of the subject achieving separation “from landscape” to claim greater identity haunts the work. The excessive mark making appears to become calloused and carved away, a greater sense of anxiety and frustration between scenes and characters depicted. Despite a certain element or character rendered in composition having a view or a gaze, even depicted outward to the viewer; there is no implication or acknowledgement of the viewer. This tactic of the gaze potentially implicating the viewer into conversation with the piece is subverted to achieve a relational dominance and a more potent memento mori, a bleak sense of insignificance is propelled upon the viewer. » (texte de Brian David Downs)