Julia Yerger wishes she still had her Photoshop fan art, the stuff she exhibited as a teenager in “naughty, guilty places on the Internet.” That early output would be generative fodder for the oil paintings that the 30-year-old artist is making now.

In their compositional density, they resemble those early collages as well as the more sophisticated digital frescoes Yerger later made while studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and in Los Angeles after graduating.

These days, the East LA–based artist rarely spends studio time online, beyond the occasional use of a computer for sketching. But the screen’s influence on the work persists anyway, driving Yerger’s canvases toward acts of compression.

“In painting, I try to translate the spirit of my digital work. There are super-close-up details and super-receded graphic ideas happening all at once,” she says. “I’m working through that in the painting, where it is a lot more challenging to make it what I want.” 

The intricacies of oil paint are ultimately what attracted Yerger to the medium. At MICA, she got her fill of idea-driven work that only required one or two decisions to cook. Yerger consciously implemented the reverse approach, where each move begets the next three. It is in the fissiparous nature of semi-abstract art, the splitting and dividing of possibility into subsets of infinity, that Yerger has found a home.

That is not to say that there aren’t acts of simplification in the artist’s work. Cartoons are a major influence, although Yerger doesn’t watch them and never really did. “To me, cartoons are great abstractions. They are beautiful but also have the capability to hide so much,” she says. “It’s a combination of things I can’t really control but I am attached to. When I look at something, I turn it into a cartoon.” 

As an illustrator, Yerger leaves a lot to her viewers’ imaginations, and it is this plastic ambivalence that leaves the door open to the sinister. This was the case with “Yard Problems,” her inaugural solo show with Clearing at the gallery’s Brussels compound this fall.

The colors of Yerger’s abstracted landscapes were vivid, glowing from within, and still somehow foreboding. It made you wonder what might be hiding in plain sight, and what we can expect next from an artist so invested in the formal qualities of infinite potential. 

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adriant Khadafhi Bereal, Isabelle Brourman, and Kahlil Robert Irving.