The Brooklyn Rail

Jo Messer’s Speed Stick, which consists of thirteen oil on panel abstractions, is part of a tendency I have observed in recent contemporary painting: an approach to abstraction that remains attuned to the influence of genre painting—in this case, figure painting—by way of intimation and vestigial cues. Compared with the work of fellow travelers like Liza Lacroix and Nicholas Campbell, Messer’s work has little to do with light sources or the wilderness; rather, her work deploys body parts and adumbrated figures sundered in prismatic expressionistic impressions. With the exception of four small, rectangular, mark-riven canvases—This forever, Shareable likeness, and two works bearing the name Title Forthcoming (all works 2026)—Messer’s paintings sketch out tortuous nude bodies, fish heads, and pareidolic visages in flesh and soot-stained furrows. Sometimes, various colliding elements, overtaken by wine-claret skeins, lose the outline of body fragments and become crag-like, evincing the possibility—but only the possibility—of a natural-humanoid emergence. Messer’s strength lies in not reducing her scenes to markedly intelligible renderings, such that apparently bodily and animal outlines slip into a swarm of mere gestures.

Thus, it is fitting that the strongest works in the exhibition use a faint line rather than strict delineation, facilitating hue- and tone-based shifts wherein contours and volumes lapse and outstrip their edges. Two in the hand is exemplary of this. In the top canvas of this diptych, a row of gray fish heads comb the lower reaches of the picture plane. At first pass, they might very well strike the percipient as hoary brushstrokes. Above them, ridged arcs and peaks are wrinkled into indentations, creasing into flows of peach and roseate washes. Below is an accumulation of mauve knees and splayed feet, each digit rendered as a rounded nodule. Messer has a tendency to shift between two vernaculars. We see this in expressionistic expanses of folded flesh reminiscent of Jenny Saville and the cartoonish reduction of figures into sloping silhouettes. The latter approach, which recalls Adam Linn’s paintings, turns the body into a series of smoothed shapes. But where Linn uses the rounded ankle or bowed finger to enclose and thereby dramatize some anatomical element, Messer’s line has a tendency to quiver, allaying the scenes’ would-be dramatic elements.

However, it is not immediately clear that Messer needs such narrative anchors. Her work is at its best when it jettisons complete figures altogether. When a kneecap gives way to a breast, itself overtaken by impossibly recurved elbows and stout phalanges, the shifting impact is effective. One wishes this kind of sequencing were extended to the space between canvases. For instance, the channel between Two in the hand’s canvases divides, rather than bridges, the two broadly autonomous images, undercutting any possibility of this visual fluctuation. The triptych Bait me in shows how Messer might better pursue coherence, as the work is able to create meaningful continuity across pictorial sectors. Its center plank-shaped element introduces wide-eyed pike heads but also continues the subordinated geranium-russet eddies of the left tract, which ultimately wash away into the eggshell and rosette rinses of the rightmost canvas. This painting (in my estimate, the strongest on view) successfully develops a visual tow that, thread-like, pulls the viewer through the scene.

In Double Dip, we find two blurred seated figures, their skin smoothed and slipping into scrawled black edges where flesh meets flesh edgewise. A few lone dribble-splotches of tangerine break flesh into pure abstract mark-making. Where these rare brightened marks are layered atop expanses of skin, they can feel extraneous. It is not that these non-naturalistic colors are wholly unwelcome, but rather that Messer is at her strongest when she confines herself to the palette of flesh, be it bruised, bloodied, or pale. Her warm apricot trills are, however, effective as purely formal elements that interrupt the recessed foreground’s block-built grid and floating oblongs; without such breaks, we would be too close to figure painting proper. Messer’s distinctive contribution is to figure flesh without venturing into the terrain of a genre study.

In Here kitty kitty, whose whimsical title belies its erogenous content, one can make out three faint human figures. One wending figure’s extended posterior presses against another’s pelvis. The first figure’s bottom is delineated by a lone black swoop. It contains the flesh, endowing this encounter with an almost cartoonish simplicity. In the background, one can make out the faint outlines of a rust-brown voyeur, its head tilted too dramatically to befit a human. Within the pictorial field, Messer doubles the scene, with the second iteration of the voyeur now hardly detectable and shifted to the left.

The strength of Messer’s approach consists in her ability to manage optical sweeps, which, at their most compelling, license the percipient’s sustained viewing, working through buried visual remnants that one might have previously failed to attend to. In comparison to her earlier work, which was populated by more readily recognizable figures, Messer has progressed in her attenuation of straightforward depiction. One wonders how much further this tendency can be taken without compromising the productive tension Messer builds between expressionistic and figurative elements.