Yulia Gasio
Gasio’s paintings express a disconnect between her reality and personal freedom and the chaos, fragmentation, and broken architecture of what her immediate family is experiencing. Yulia Gasio explains that her life experience has forced her to create politically charged work.
As her family experiences the atrocities of political unrest in her country of origin, she expresses a sense of longing and responsibility towards her community. She acknowledges the liberties of being in a safe country. Still, she is struck with wanting a better life for her people, who inevitably became refugees from violent, destructive acts of war.
Gasio’s work is rooted in observational drawing and painting. She is inspired by current events, historical genocide, war, and her passion for depicting humanity. No matter how often she strays from the subject of war, it continues to circle back into her life as if it haunts her in some ways.
“There is benevolence in working with the human figure. You must really love people to portray people on your canvas.” This struck me, as a figurative painter, because I relate to the idea of careful observation of a person for hours at a time, equating to some sort of love and investment in the moment while depicting the character, sensibilities, and aura of the model, who is often exposed and vulnerable.
Not only is the artist responsible for showing care towards immortalizing the model in paint, but we are responsible for how the audience forms opinions on the person depicted and the messaging we are putting forth. Figure painters can watch carefully, tirelessly, even for days on end, with the same individual conducting the same pose and continually notice new things about the person. It’s a much deeper form of love and appreciation, unique to the model-painter relationship.
Yulia Gasio uses the process of imagination from descriptions expressed to her via her parents to create a sense of decay and abandonment in her work. She takes images from her childhood memories of landmarks and buildings that are now destroyed, and she uses them as inspiration to imagine and compose intense grief, unrest, and humanity.
Gasio began her career with graduating with a degree in linguistics, immigrating to the United States, and carving and pioneering her path to pursuing her passion in the arts. Although she needed to assimilate into a different political and cultural environment, she could still perpetuate strong ties to her home country's happenings and current events by diving deep into her personal artistic practice of painting.
Learning about the details, personal accounts, and collective consciousness of the Ukraine war was surprising to me. Gasio talks about her nephew, who grew up in the war environment and has adapted to differentiate bullet shells and their corresponding weapon. The child, who has spent most of his life in a conflict-filled environment, doesn’t know any other life besides surviving the war. The emotional toll this takes on Gasio pushes her to oscillate between politically charged work and painting figures for the sake of observation and art therapy.
Gasio’s life experience fully informs her art practice in that, because she is able to experience freedom from immigrating to California, it gives her a sense of responsibility towards depicting her community in Ukraine. This subject matter and concept fully informs her work and influences her to pursue the depiction of humanity and the benevolence of observational investment toward the people she holds near and dear to her heart.
Art’s relationship to political, social, and cultural histories and frameworks is profound and heavily integrated, almost inevitable and uncontrollable. As Yulia Gasio mentioned, if it were up to her, she would be making paintings about palm trees and still lives. Still, because of her life experiences, she is moved by the political climate of her place of origin in stark contrast with her experience in the space she inhabits now. Pressing issues that affect the artists aren’t decided upon - they are the unavoidable source leading to forward movement that fuels the artist’s creation.
It is interesting that despite the intense political subject matter, Yulia Gasio continues to explore the use of color to set a mood and the use of composition to elicit a psychological narrative in the paintings. She has an extensive study practice, which informs her more emotive, war-themed works. This way, she developed a way to explore and make the most out of what color, mark-making, and imaginative invention can do to a painting and how this can affect the way the audience perceives the work emotionally.
Written by: Clarisse Abelarde