Jo Dennis

JO-OHS presents the show A Glass of Absinthe by Jo Dennis, curated by Elisa Carollo.

Jo Dennis’s works are deeply rooted in the fabric of life, immersing viewers in their layered complexity. Her paintings, created on used military tents chosen as supports, accumulate stratified marks and layers of paint through an intuitive and almost convulsive process.

Dennis’s intensely physical and viscerally engaging approach transforms the painting process into a metaphor for the overlay of sensations, emotions, and memories that shape our experience of the world. She explores the psychosomatic interplay between being and perceiving, often integrating various objects into her works to ground them in the material realm. The painterly and bodily traces left on the surface become remnants of past events and reflections on what is absent, lost, or gone forever—persisting as spectral echoes in our memory.

Through her spontaneous orchestration of painterly traces, dense stratifications of marks, and brimming gestures, Dennis’s works evolve into diaries, capturing the complex interplay of physical actions and psychological reactions that shape existential experience.

Marking the artist’s debut in Mexico, the show’s title, Glass of Absinthe, references Picasso’s sculpture of the same name, in which he incorporated an actual absinthe spoon alongside a bronze sugar cube and glass. By introducing everyday objects into the realm of art, Picasso disrupted the traditional notion of artistic genius and the “sublime,” grounding his creation in the fertile relationship between art and ordinary experience.

Building on this Cubist and Dadaist legacy, Dennis incorporates ordinary objects into her works, weaving them with painterly abstraction to probe the relationship between human stories and material culture while threading them into the continuum of art history. Her process involves a dense choreography of past physical actions, emotional triggers, and stories embedded in the materials she uses. In this way, Dennis’s works transcend the traditional canvas, extending into space as entities that embody layered temporal and experimental dimensions.

Works like Twins or Beast of Burden evoke a bodily presence, emphasizing the importance of physical and tactile engagement as part of a less alienated, more memory-infused process of meaning-making in our interaction with the external world.

Dense in texture and infused with the physicality of their creation, Dennis’s abstractions defy the confines of the canvas, transforming painting into a spontaneous and uncodified medium that records and translates both inward and outward perceptions of reality. This tension between haunting and liberation imbues her works with revelatory epiphanies of human existence.

Sensorially rich, emotionally resonant, and symbolically evocative, Dennis’s works transcend materiality, encompassing not just physical presence but the experiential, memorial, and cultural meanings embedded within them.

–Elisa Carollo