Biography

Originally from Nyon, Jessica Russ (08.08.88) lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland. She started her training in Visual Arts at the ECAL (Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne) in 2008. She continues her training by doing a master at the HEAD (haute école d’art et de design de Genève), where she focuses on painting only. In 2019, the culture department of Lausanne grants her a studio in the old stables of the Mon Repos park for a period of five years. That same year, she received the Alice Bailly prize as well as the prize of the city of Nyon. Within the framework of the Alice Bailly prize, she exhibits individually at the CHUV space, in Lausanne. In 2021 she presents her second solo exhibition « Versicolor", at Standard Deluxe, an independent art space in Lausanne. In the same year, she participated in an exhibition of new acquisitions from the collection of the Banque cantonale Vaudoise (BCV) at the Musée cantonale d'art de Lausanne (MCBA). In 2022, she begin to work with the Heinzer Reszler gallery in Lausanne and presented her solo show "Sun Salutation".

Since 2021, her work has been shown in German-speaking Switzerland at the Blue Velvet Projects Gallery in Zurich for the exhibition "Equilibre" alongside artists Rebekka Steiger and Lea Krebs, in Basel as a finalist in the Swissartawards 2021 and then in Olten, where she present her solo show « Juicy Fields » in a new run space: « Nomadic Art Space ».

Her paintings are in numerous private and public collections such as the FAP, the BNS, BNP Paribas, the BCV, the villa Bernasconi, the city of Lancy, the city of Nyon and the Gymnase of Nyon. It was awarded the Prix du Public by the Friends of the Pully Museum (AMP) in 2022, and on that occasion became part of the museum's collection.

Work process

My work process is divided into two distinct phases: the research phase and the painting work in the studio. I begin by creating my own image repertory, from which I draw the shapes and colors that inspire my new paintings. In the studio, I have the luxury of being exclusively concerned with the painting itself. I am sometimes an executor, sometimes an observer, mixing and applying the colors on the canvas and then observing the various associations that emerge through the layers.
My paintings are mental landscapes whose forms can evoke the curves of a body as well as anonymous geometric and organic figures. The shapes, previously traced with a pencil on the canvas, remain ambiguous. The imbrication of all these abstract forms takes the direction of a certain figuration which wants to flee, so that it becomes difficult to name it.

It is then the turn of the colorist. The forms become sharp and precise flat tints of color, to the point that no concession is possible, the acrylic allows no repentance. Perspective is lost, planes merge.

The search for color is perhaps the most spontaneous part of my work. Chance intervenes here, as I draw from the fortuitous remains of the mixtures prepared for the previous painting when preparing the colors of a new painting. In this, my palette follows its own cycle, a random cycle.
The radical superimposition of lines on the colored solids puts the drawing in the foreground and frees the gesture. Drawing with the brush is for me a way of bringing movement into compositions that evoke more immobility, suspended time. These lines make their way incongruously, hesitating between the marked out paths traced by the meeting of the flat tints and the exploration of unknown grounds.

The independent line disregards the colored cartography and restores a balance when the shock of the flat tints creates a slight vacillation. Thus two temporalities confront each other in a single space-time: that of the painted canvas.

INSTAGRAM