Julia Signe, “Cookie Jar,” graphite on paper, 8″ x 9″/Photo: Povos gallery
We live in an era of low attention spans and dwindling intellectual curiosity. In an attempt to capture the waning interest of the general public, the art world has been forced to adopt a new modus operandi: I want it big, and I want it now. Art fairs fill gargantuan untraversable warehouses. Painters make decisive strokes on increasingly large canvases. Sculptors fulfill colossal commissions in the firmest media possible. All the subtler aspects of aesthetic creation—muted tones, barely visible marks—are drowned out by a constant and persistent bellow: “NOTICE ME!” Against the background of this nuance-free art world, Julia Signe’s current show at Povos gallery is a breath of fresh air. Rather than succumbing to the size-obsessed status quo, Signe produces humbly sized works on paper—nothing I saw looked much bigger than a piece of printer paper—using the technically demanding medium of graphite. They are desperately necessary—when’s the last time a gallery show really demanded something of your looking?—and, once you’re past the initial shock, quite beautiful.
Julia Signe, “Garden Tricks,” 2023-24, graphite on paper, 8 1/2″ x 12″/Photo: Povos gallery
Signe’s oeuvre is characterized by her use of anthropomorphic “bird-people,” figures that possess human bodies and avian heads. They look plainly ridiculous. (This isn’t a fact you ever become desensitized to—there’s always something just a little hilarious about the appearance of birds with breasts.) Yet when these unlikely protagonists are situated within fantastical landscapes, the result is incongruous to their farcical appearances: a playful mysticism makes itself palpable. Before you give yourself over to Signe’s communion with nature, you’ll scratch your head. How did we get here? I have no idea. That Signe is able to achieve such a lofty end with means so spare is a sight to behold.
Julia Signe, “A Sacred Signal,” 2023, graphite on paper, 9 3/8″ x 6 3/4″/Photo: Povos gallery
Signe’s list of influences is too populated to fully enumerate in a short piece like this one. In “Cookie Jar” alone, which depicts a hesitant bird-person removing the lid from a porcelain vase, I see the quietude of Giorgio de Chirico’s contemplative street corners, the dreamlike physics of Max Ernst’s psychic landscapes, and the uneasy foliage of a Dürer woodcut. However, two big names seem to permeate all of Signe’s pictures, both replete with spiritual undertones. The precise visual language of Odilon Redon—whose symbolist works attempted to articulate absolute truths in formal terms—is visible in Signe’s works through kitschy trinkets that are transmuted into objects of divine reverence. Compositionally, it’s Hieronymus Bosch who takes the wheel: like Bosch, Signe depicts all visual elements of each drawing, regardless of how far they are from the viewer, with perfect visual clarity. Such omniscience could only be held by the eye of God. (This also makes for an astonishing viewing experience: your brain struggles to catch up with your eyes, leaving you dumbfounded, wondering how she did it.)
Julia Signe, “California Girl,” 2023, graphite on paper, 6″ x 6.5″/Photo: Povos gallery
Signe’s very medium seems to tap into the cosmic realm as well. Whether it manifests itself in the phosphorescent figures of “A Sacred Signal,” the faintly glowing duck in “Garden Tricks,” or the strobe lights in the background of “California Girl,” one attribute of her pictures is impossible to miss: they are not constituted by mere gradients between sparsely and heavily shaded regions, but outright spiritual battles between light and dark. The subtly luminescent forms that populate Signe’s drawings are reminiscent of the writings of Baruch Spinoza, a Jewish theologian who asserted that all living beings possess conatus: an irrevocable tendency to further their own existence. Her figures—and Signe herself, whose self-perpetuation lies in the creative act—cry out, in the immortal words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “What I do is me: for that I came.” In an era of stoic coldness, this show’s jubilant self-affirmations blaze a verdant path forward.
Julia Signe’s “Birds of No Feather” is on view at Povos, 600 West Van Buren, through July 6.