Jwan Yosef’s works explore both formalism and autobiographical themes, with a conceptual undertaking that queers the principles of modernist aesthetics. Yosef’s tactical use of abstraction serves opportunities to release entendres and challenge viewers to break from passive gazes towards a plurality of perspectives.

Whether fixating on the materiality or language of an object, Yosef’s inspirations draw from the potentialities of states of being. The core of this fixation engages a reexamining of functions, routines and expectations of artistic gestures, materials and their interpreted values. Yosef invites the vernacular of everyday materials to a re-thinking of possibilities—a poetic exercise that extracts the many metaphors and biases society projects on familiar effects. The potency of Yosef’s endeavors ultimately refines a poignant and lucid reminder of our own relationships and interpretations of the everyday world and each other.

The exhibited works in Jwan Yosef’s Object / Object are no redundancy. A self-described conceptual painter, Yosef’s works are not only attentive to the formal values that physically shape a work of art, but are rather heavily invested in the language constructs inherent to the processes of projections and interpretations of an object. In the case of Object / Object, Yosef invites us to examine the dimensionality of the ubiquitous term’s many facades and functions—from the anonymity of its description as a noun, to its performance as a radically action-oriented verb. Mirroring the transitory states of this word unfolds Yosef’s Object series. The objects here hold no singular identity, at once painting and sculpture, the works subtly “activate” a limbo of being, the action of the artist’s hand pulling down the canvas can hold an iconoclastic maneuver, yet at the same time what might be considered an act of violence can also be read as a revelatory of what lies beneath, to what Yosef describes as an “undressing of the canvas.” Expressing a most sensual disrobing, the canvas’ materiality reveals its naked material, grids of threaded linen similar to clothing, and the canvas fortified with gesso and white paint holds a sculptural form, reminiscent of the folds of wet drapery carved in Greco-Roman frieze figures. The undressing gesture transforms the painting into sculpture, or an entity existing in-between. This transfigurative quality of the “Object” series, hold allegorical poetics in their essence. Each iteration offers an examination of mark-making manifested in folding, tucking, pulling, concealing, and preserving of the visual planes—indexing the artist’s hand in grappling meaning, within the lexicons of minimalism, to ultimately dialogue the power dynamics that instigate objectification.

Yosef continues his deconstruction of the entendres of both material and language in his Masking series. In this series, Yosef employs the utilitarian material of tape, and its familiarity as a quotidian binding material for quick-fixes, as an artist’s material to mask edges and render perfect lines, and even as a bondage material for kink (a playful wink to minimalist aesthetics’ affinities for surface “fetish”). Yosef is drawn to this ready-made material that is fraught with varying applications and contexts. With considered site-specific installations Yosef taughtly applies the tape —floor to ceiling—drawing contours that alter the interior horizon lines and bodily experience of the space. Whether disrupting the invisibility of white cube gallery walls or using the edges of the material to compose chiaroscuro-style cascades along the architectural motifs of the Italian basilica, Basilica di Santa Maria in Montesanto Chisea degli Artisti — Yosef cleverly coaxes the material’s liminal nature, illustrating an unexpected prominence of a most simple material. Yosef is also drawn to the ephemeral quality of the material and describes the aspects of time and chance with the experience of the work:

The duality of the stretched duct tape has many forms in my mind, the idea of sexually being tied up and the contrasting form of near abduction-style restraint. The work plays with the thin line between sex and violence. This series too resists a single identity. The very strict, stretched form it takes on from wall to floor, however taught, holds an ephemeral quality where tensions ultimately meet temporality. A durational element comes into play and we see how quickly it can become a flaccid and torn object, dangling off the wall.

Yosef further engages the language of the material with his play on the artwork’s titles, Electrical, Masking, Silver, and Painter’s, carrying double meanings that stretch beyond their signified and intended utility. For Jwan Yosef’s collaboration with Henzel Studio, Yosef invited yet another transfiguration of the work. Henzel transforms the work into uniquely editioned handwoven rugs inspired by the disruptive minimalism and elegant contours of Yosef’s Masking series.

JWAN YOSEF: Object / Object