Julie Curtiss is great at making us reconsider the ordinary. The Paris-born, New York-based artist has an eye for that crossover between the familiar and the faintly ridiculous – scenes so known to us that we forget their absurdity. Except Curtiss doesn’t.
‘The ordinary is where the extraordinary takes place. Within routine or boredom, I’m always looking for that moment when a glitch occurs,’ she says. ‘In French, we have the expression sauter du coq à l’âne – literally, to jump from the rooster to the donkey – which means going off on a tangent. I think that’s very close to how my mind works. I love those moments when I’m walking around and suddenly have to take a second look because my brain has misconstrued a scene or a fleeting moment. Ideally, that’s the feeling I’m trying to capture in my paintings.’
Curtiss’ highly stylised, figurative scenes combine this quotidian with a surreal feeling that makes them almost dreamlike. We recognise the two friends catching up over a cigarette, their heads swathed in the bandages we assume makes them post-facelift. Elsewhere, dirty laundry in a washing machine drum becomes vaguely erotic thanks to a close crop and suggestive foot placement. A tight framing of a tarot reading lends a knowing humour.
‘For me, humour is a way into something more philosophical,’ Curtiss adds. ‘There’s a reason comedians can be great philosophers, or why the king’s fool is sometimes the only person allowed to tell the truth. Humour is almost a byproduct of exposing the paradoxes within a situation. I love it when things keep flipping back and forth, when you can see both the thesis and the antithesis. To me, it’s not that everything and its opposite are equally true, but rather that every truth contains a little bit of its opposite.’
Adding to these juxtapositions is that fact we can see ourselves in Curtiss’ paintings, an aspect gently encouraged by the general omission of her characters’ faces. ‘As my style became more illustrative, I started having misgivings about how to paint faces. Should I paint them realistically, or make them more cartoonish, with round eyes and linear mouths? Or should they be more like caricatures? I never felt comfortable taking the illustrative approach all the way. I felt it would diminish what I was trying to say.’ Curtiss’ characters are so specific as to feel intimate to us, but in their blankness they are anonymous. ‘They need to feel oddly intimate and distant at once,’ she says.
Ultimately, Curtiss isn’t looking for direct answers in her work, but is more interested in spaces of ambiguity and an uncanny recontextualisation. ‘I’d like viewers to leave the show, go about their lives, and suddenly come across something in the street that makes them think, Oh, that reminds me of this painter. I like the idea that they might begin to experience things in everyday life with a slight bend or kink. I really love it when people start sending me pictures of things they’ve seen and thought, That’s a Julie Curtiss painting!’
Julie Curtiss, ‘Unreal,’ from 10 November – 1 9 December at Gagosian New York