In Jess Valice’s recent paintings, it’s usually the eyes you notice first. Huge, heavy-lidded pools, resolute and weary, as if their owner had lately gone through something but was nevertheless holding on, engaging the world. But then, by contrast, there’s the ears: oversized, sometimes mismatched in colour and on occasion reddish, the artist deliberately clowning herself or her subjects. The who’s-who distinction is ambiguous; Valice’s portraits can look like near-dysmorphic caricatures of her own features, but even in double portraits, everyone she paints looks somewhat like her. Her cast of comic melancholics, then, at once shares a range of emotions—a generalised sadness, exhaustion, stoicism—while being aware that expressing uncut melancholy (and fixating on the self, even in a confessional age) can itself be a quick turnoff for others. And that, conversely, humour, self-deprecation and absurdism are ways to keep a viewer with you, as they find out that the work is relatable not just to its maker but to themselves.

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For Valice, whose art is predicated on reaching out, certainly isn’t suggesting that her heaviest feelings are exclusive to her. Nobody gets through this life unscathed, and everyone must find ways of living through their personal cyclones—plus, lately, their unasked-for participation in collective disasters like pandemics—from moment to moment. Here’s one of Valice’s characters, rosy-nosed, flat-lipped, crocheting a currently tiny green thing which contrasts with the bulbous hugeness of the knitter’s hands. There’s a sense of someone escaping into manual making, a break from routine, as an escape hatch from their thoughts that also offers the comfort of creating something. (Painting itself, a slow and physical medium, might be considered a parallel activity, albeit a higher one with, at least here, disproportionate results.) The edges of the canvas, too, are smartly instrumentalised, pressing in—as so often in Valice’s work—on the central figure, like the walls of a home you haven’t been able to leave for months. None of this is a joke, but at the same time, look again and the canvas flips: it’s been painted, seemingly, by someone able to get at least momentary distance on their own trials, who recognises that emotions are highly changeable and that we should use whatever makes us feel better, even if it’s self-ridicule.

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— Martin Herbert