Art historians are more than a little obsessed with the distinction between nudity and nakedness. Jo Messer, for her part, is obsessed with painting. “I just come in every day and start,” she says, which is rarer to hear from an artist than you might think.
Messer’s work is indeed focused on women’s naked bodies, but she’s not interested in representing the idea of a woman at all. It’s their guts, abstracted and perversely figured, that captivate her.
Earlier this year, the Cooper Union and Yale School of Art graduate, now 32, opened “EAT ME,” a solo show that took over both locations of Manhattan gallery 56 Henry. “There was a large painting of, mostly, women crouching in oyster shells. It was a play on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which is a really beautiful, virgin-like Venus,” says Messer of the show’s eponymous marquee work. “I did my dirty, slutty version.”
Using a palette of chaotic and warped blues, Messer welcomed the often-obscured realities of female sexuality into the light, letting everything hang out. Eat me, 2023, is a fitting representation of Messer’s oeuvre as a whole, in which bulbous limbs and overflowing bodies swell within the frame, threatening to burst free of the canvas that contains them.
“I begin a painting with nothing, just a color,” the artist says of her approach. “I don’t usually start with a clear direction, so the painting changes and evolves as I’m making it.”
It is clear, when speaking to Messer in her Brooklyn studio, that the artist recognizes the multiplicity of interpretations that might arise from her work. She muses that the end goal is simply that. “I strive for [my paintings] to have some sort of openness,” she says, “and to be read in multiple ways.”
Lately, Messer has shifted her oil painting practice from canvas to wood panels, broadening her horizons in anticipation of a show at Morán Morán gallery in Mexico City next spring. Given Messer’s subject matter, there is always more ground to cover, more flesh to touch.
“It’s a lot of material-based discovery,” she explains. “I’m not yet who I want to be as a painter.”
For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Emma Stern, and Oscar yi Hou.
