By Ted Barrow
SAN FRANCISCO’S Yeon Building at 432-436 Jackson Street was either built in 1855 or rebuilt after 1906: surviving multiple earthquakes and fires or else rising from the rubble—nobody’s quite sure which. This is a perfect setting to encounter Lisa Jo’s Ecology of Fear, an exhibition now showing at Gallery Wendi Norris. Both the indeterminate history of the building and the current show on its ground floor reveal something about uncertainty that seems, right now, crucial to engage with. Mike Davis’s 1998 rumination on disaster and Los Angeles, which lends the show its title, is preoccupied with peril and impermanence. Disaster is ever-present, nothing is assured.
Passing through the gallery’s double doors, the visitor is confronted by an uneven diptych—two differently sized rectangular canvases suspended one atop the other by the most minimal steel supports and plates—that right away feels far too big for the space. Too much, too soon, too little time to take it in. This is intentional. To give the painting its proper due, you must step outside, but by stepping outside, exiting the rarefied space of the gallery, you bring the world back into the space of the work. The painting’s title, In the Cut (all work is 2025), may refer to the small horizontal space between the two linked canvases, though it also suggests something edgier (like film noir titles, all the names of these paintings are fragmentary and imply more than they reveal). In the Cut establishes a series of thrust-and-parry characteristics that echo throughout the remaining works on view. Collapsing binaries between figurative and abstract, flat color plane and gestural graphic mark, inside and outward, Jo’s work is poised within haunting encounters of place and space, hovering in the cut between historic brick facade and pared-down interior. Her work looks at home here, if the idea of home is not tied to place.
The steel fixtures supporting In the Cut were inspired by architect Carlo Scarpa’s elegantly functional modernist interventions in historic structures, exemplified by his restoration of the medieval Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy. The palette of ruddy browns, lemon yellows, and indigo blues crackles against floating biomorphic shapes, as if the formal qualities of the paintings refuse to settle. Her work evokes a lineage of challenging painting, from Marcel Duchamp’s loose-shingled style in Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) through the work of Roberto Matta and Charlene von Heyl, with whom Jo studied.
Searing oranges and reds flicker across her canvases, taking on a new valence after last year’s wildfires, an association encouraged by the use of Davis’s title. Los Angeles as palimpsest, a trope of 1990s critical theory, has returned with terrifying salience as photos of fire-scorched neighborhoods eerily resemble an erased text. Although Jo is skeptical of attempts to read her work through the lens of identity or biographical detail, the bare facts of having been raised in Los Angeles and based in Berlin do seem to come into play in her work’s noirish dimension. The mass-culture modernism of film noir is inseparable from Los Angeles—where, according to Davis, the shadows and dark logic of German expressionism came into high relief against the crumbling Victorian and Edwardian backdrop of Bunker Hill, to give rise to the topoi of Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and, later, Ridley Scott. In the spatial poetics of L.A. noir, bright facades hide dark secrets, through which the haunted detective antiheroes oscillate between blue- and white-collar work and crime, speaking in tones of disenchantment, inseparable from the worlds they diagnose.
Everything is contingent in these plots, as in Jo’s paintings: each formal component, from the elegant vertical stanzas that march across the canvas from left to right in Bad Faith to the same work’s corporeal hints of figures that transmute into elegantly tattered forms, demands a double take. What might first read as sinuous columns of smoke above the voluptuous dorsal view of a body is simultaneously legible as frenetic bursts of calligraphic loops, liberated from narrative and figure. The shared noir theme is that things are never what they seem; they never will be. Unlike a lot of artwork today, planned and executed to be seen on a screen and comprehended in a flash, Jo’s paintings do not resolve smoothly, if ever. They can be chewed on but not consumed. They haunt.
Hung together, Pretty Teachings and Petty Teachings are the same height (70.5 inches) but different widths (65.5 and 47 inches respectively). Even writing out that difference feels petty, but it is relevant to the Lynchian way that they relate to one another. I mean that they mirror each other, but not precisely; the doubling effects a deliberate confusion. Petty Teachings was painted first, and then the artist made the second, wider painting as an approximate mirror image. In both, a warped row of delicately rendered white balusters splays out toward the lower corner, mirroring one another. The bottom half of a leaning body in profile seems to explode into a range of suggestive forms, while rectilinear boxes and intersecting lines on each canvas suggest some kind of order, imposed scattershot. It’s extraordinary that the artist can pull off overlapping so many techniques without chaos. Matissean boxes float and frame arbitrary passages and details; orthogonal lines and transmogrified anatomies recall Francis Bacon’s angsty avatars and spaces; and although there seems to be a foreground and background established in some sections, Jo cannily upends such assurances. Lines that one instinctually sees as a horizon are warped, skies are yellow, clouds are blue. This is not a painter of dull, easy answers but one who sows ravishing doubt.
If the 18th-century gothic novel and Charles Dickens spawned film noir, and the neo-noir wave of the late 20th century reflected a disenchantment with modernity, what kind of moment do we inhabit here? Disenchantment is a good day; confused doom is our default. Yet through this fractured moment of disordered attention, Jo’s commitment to complexity strikes a much-needed note. Easy answers are seldom true; confused investigation begets wonder, and awe becomes empathy. Peace and prosperity often produce kitsch, but sometimes art offers a way through our dark present. As Orson Welles’s Harry Lime put it in The Third Man (1949): “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had […] 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
