Spotlight: Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow

OCTOBER 26-NOVEMBER 12, 2022

The FLAG Art Foundation’s Spotlight exhibition series includes new or never-before-exhibited artworks accompanied by commissioned pieces of writing. It is the hope of this series to create focused and thoughtful dialogues between the visual arts and critics, scholars, poets, etc. In its sixth iteration, the Spotlight features Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow’s The Surrender, 2022, with a text by Sofia Bertilsson, art critic and Founder & CEO of Art Insider PR.


On Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow’s The Surrender, 2022
By Sofia Bertilsson

“Behold the hands,” wrote French philosopher Michel de Montaigne[1]. In Renaissance paintings, hands emerge from the folds of ornate fabrics, they point, push, and guide our gaze. In Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow’s paintings, long, elegant hands appear porcelain and eternal, yet they also actively pull little threads attached to her central figures. As if from a Surrealist dream, Jallow’s hands (detached from bodies) hover in thin air. In a way, her figures are self-portraits, but they do not depict her as such. They are of young women, sometimes pensively lounging or at rest, frozen in a choreographic moment, or on the cusp of doing something we cannot know; they exist in a moment of balance and stillness.

Jallow grew up in Stockholm, Sweden, with a Swedish mother and a Gambian father. With artists and architects in her family, and painting since she was a child, she still struggled to channel her creativity. That search would eventually take her to Los Angeles, CA, where she studied graphic design and animation at Glendale College and continued to paint in her spare time. How and when does one become an artist? She pinpoints that particular moment as when she was emboldened enough to rent a studio in a warehouse in LA, brimming with other emerging artists like herself. There, she found peers and a context.

Painting has died a thousand deaths, and yet artists still aspire to become painters. On one hand, it’s a technical practice of refining one’s abilities—not dissimilar from the Old Masters—and on the other, it’s about finding one’s identity within the landscape of contemporary painting. So old and yet still so new. Jallow draws on various elements from painting’s long history and puts it all back together, collage-like, in her own way. She tenderly places her figures, mainly young women, against vibrant, contrasting backgrounds of green and orange, blue and gold—think of early Renaissance Madonnas. In other moments, she opts for an almost monochromatic palette, wherein she combines shades of grey with varied tones of skin and hair.

Jallow’s choice of clothing is significant as it grounds her figures, the women we observe. Whether they are dressed in a pantsuit, an oversize blazer casually open to reveal a naked torso, or in athleisure (a hoodie, shorts, and sneakers), their clothing conveys something specific about their characters. Unlike the finely detailed textures in Renaissance painting, Jallow’s approach feels closer to the 19th century Japanese prints that inspired Impressionist artists. With a few simple, sure-handed brushstrokes, Jallow loosely delineates a jacket’s lapel, a pocket, or a fold, all the ways a garment can envelop the body. Carefully rendered Afros, braids, and curls, frame delicate faces with shut eyes, or eyes shielded by magic hands. These hands tell us something; they guide our gaze inward, as Jallow’s figures look inward too.

Floating in bright expanses of paint, faces, hands, and other areas of bare flesh—suspended shards of Realism—are rendered in amorphous shapes filled with tones of browns, creams, and grays. Freewheeling hands, also painted in a range of skin tones, sometimes hold strings that attach to faces; those strings also curl across faces or onto clothes. The line of the string is an important feature in Jallow’s practice, both as formal device in the painting, as well as a symbolic one weaving together the artist’s different identities.

Jallow embraces her Swedish and Gambian heritage; she speaks English, Swedish, and Wolof, and talks about the experience of belonging to several cultures and identities all at once. Her Scandinavian love of nature seems to translate into lush summery greens and wintery sky blues, colors that often take over both the background and the loosely sketched silhouettes of her figures. An earlier work from 2022, titled Två i en (Two In One), depicts a young woman seated in a flowering field, which is painted as flat as a printed textile. While an elongated, dark- skinned hand emerges from the figure’s hair, shielding her eyes while holding a miniature silver bracelet[2], a disembodied, light-skinned hand presents her with a lily-of-the valley in its elegantly curved fingers. Perhaps a riddle? Or dream? The strength of Jallow’s storytelling is ambiguity. Surrealists did this so well, and they still keep us guessing, thinking (with an open mind), and questioning, all the while delivering powerful images and words straight into our subconsciouses. Each of Jallow’s paintings follows the logic of a dream. Each of her characters could be someone else, another woman, another being, or have multiple identities–and still we know, this is me, this is you.

Jallow’s work could be read in dialogue with other female Swedish artists, such as Lena Cronqvist and Sara-Vide Ericson, both of whom investigate the notion of “self” and “self-narrative” in figurative painting. Another parallel is Los Angeles-based painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose layered, figurative compositions explore family through domestic and social situations. Jallow does not anchor her character in a landscape, or within a set of objects that connotate home, instead, she suspends them in vibrant fields of color, in flat spaces, in windows filled by imaginary expanses, halos and hopes, flowers and night skies. It’s that particular space that only painting can create.

And what about the hands? Hands that promise and pray, hands that instruct and command, hands that speak with a variation to make tongues envious—to somewhat freely quote Montaigne. Hands that say all the things that words cannot. Jallow’s hands reach down from above, just as in The Surrender, almost touching an outstretched hand and lift us up.

Footnotes:
[1] “Behold the hands, how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate, refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command, mock and what not besides, with a variation and multiplication of variation which makes the tongue envious.”
[2] As described by Jallow, ”Worn by Gambians and other west Africans, the miniature bracelet is gifted to you as soon as you're born, to bring luck and protect you from evil.”

About:

Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow (b. 1990, Stockholm, Sweden) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Jallow attended Glendale College, Los Angeles, CA, where she graduated in 2014 with a degree in computer animation. Recent exhibitions include Uppväxten | Sverige, Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, Sweden (2022) (solo); Grand Opening, Allouche Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Blackity Black Friday, Sole Folks, Los Angeles, CA (2021); and Les Femmes, Maxwell Dickson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2014). Commissions and public projects include Adult Swim, Juneteenth, Los Angeles, Ca (2021); Use Your Gift Project, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Special Project 1310 S Hill St, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Integral Studios, Los Angeles, CA (2020); and The Zeus Network, Los Angeles, CA (2020). Jallow is currently a resident at Mohilef Studios, a studio project space run in collaboration with gallerist Carl Kostyál and artist Canyon Castator.

Sofia Bertilsson writes art reviews for the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Bertilsson is a member of the International Catalogue Raisonné Association (ICRA) and is editor of a forthcoming catalogue raisonné for Swedish artist Torsten Andersson (1926-2009). She is a contemporary art and media specialist based in Lund, Skåne County, Sweden. Founder and CEO of Art Insider PR, a Scandinavia-based PR agency, Bertilsson specializes in content and storytelling and has extensive experience working with different types of organizations, including foundations, institutions, businesses, brands, and creatives. Art Insider PR focuses on art projects, cultural destinations, lifestyle, and luxury, and has had successful collaborations with clients including Bonniers Konsthall, Falsterbo Photo Art Museum, Focus Foundation, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Malmö Konsthall, Wanås Konst, among others. The agency also offers international art advising and consulting and Bertilsson is a VIP representative for the art fairs ARCO Madrid and ARCO Lisbon. She is a member of Creative Board, Region Skåne. Bertilsson also curates talks, exhibitions, and digital events.

#RugiyatouYlvaJallow