Jeff Juhlin, “Double Butte”

“I just want somebody that sees my work to get an experience they wouldn’t get anywhere else”—Jeff Juhlin, 15 Bytes, 2011

His supporters at ‘A’ Gallery have assembled a small but eloquent introduction to the revolutionary new direction Utah native Jeff Juhlin has taken over the past few years, in which he seems to have abandoned recent decades of increasingly complex painting that—as the critical opinion of the first quarter of the 21st century seeks and often finds in our artistic moment—“expands what it’s possible to do” with—in his case—the medium of encaustic painting.

If Juhlin wanted a soundtrack to his latest professional decade, one is ready to hand in John Lennon and the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” This groundbreaking musical work begins in mid-stride, rushing through a pair of challengingly surreal anecdotes set in an operatic soundscape that builds to a symphonic climax, ascending in complexity until it has nowhere further to go…and then breaking off suddenly, leaving behind only a strident piano ostinato. This pulse then becomes the support for a straightforward narrative—the titular story of the day in the singer’s life: “Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head….”

Of course, music is the most abstract art and the song’s orchestral bridge, with all its sonic complexity, resembles Juhlin’s own extensive exploration of and devotion to that formula. He began with several years of grad school at the San Francisco Art Institute, his first and only sustained time away from Salt Lake City, which he emerged from with a devotion to acrylic abstraction. There’s even an uncanny similarity—admittedly totally coincidental—between the then-waning popularity of non-representational art and Lennon’s plea, “A crowd of people turned away, but I just had to look….”

Jeff Juhlin, “Stratum #13”

This foregrounding of design served Juhlin well, and eventually became the conceptual and also physical support for his mixed media work when he discovered wax a few years later. You can see it peeking out from between thickly textured, horizontal bands of intensely-colored wax that give his most elaborate works, like “Stratum #13,” an additional, sculptural dimension. Writing about these wonders for 15 Bytes, I wrestled with the way he gathers both the geological reality and visual perspectives of Utah’s unique topography into a cerebral landscape. His is a planet seemingly free of gravity, in which layers of wax on paint on panel that were laid down using real gravity on a horizontal table are tilted up to meet the eye. Just so, the layers of limestone and sand that accumulated across the southwest were cut through by the Colorado and other rivers to reveal epic vistas like the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley.

At that point in his career, Juhlin didn’t literally represent this geologic extravagance. Rather, he abstracted from visual information what can be known about the land’s formation into an original image all his own. The curators at ‘A’ Gallery have selected a few of these elaborate works for comparison and hung them nearby. Contemplating them, it’s possible to see how much effort it took to conceive them, let alone to mix so much wax and paint and then melt them together in a controlled fusion. Not to mention the effort of the willing viewer to follow this artistic journey and provide it with an individual and uniquely personal destination. It’s like the Beatles, backed by a hundred or so trained musicians and the recently-invented multi-track stereo technology, discovering that they’d stretched their materials to the breaking point. Where to go from here?

Jeff Juhlin, “Blue Sky #2”

The answer in both cases was a step back to an older, more accessible form: a song in solo voice in one case, a picture collaged from carefully chosen papers in the other, with each grounded in the real world of events, sights and stories. Of course neither remains so spartan for long, but the break has served its purpose in reconnecting the audience to fundamentals.

Except for a few so-called “public” works, primarily sculptures meant for outdoor installation, Juhlin hasn’t shown work of such decidedly representational form. Yet in these half-dozen collages, he foregrounds a similarly constructed approach to the one he found using encaustics. In fact, a viewer who looks closely—or takes a hint from the descriptions next to the new works—will see that he hasn’t abandoned the use of wax, but employs it to lend subtle textures to his painted background and to unify the overlapping layers of paper that create the fluctuating sense of perspective that characterizes these vistas. In fact, these works skirt a line, neither displaying the thing itself, where we can surrender to the visual illusion that Utah audiences enjoy in so many ways, nor entirely occupying the equally rich alternative, in which being in the presence of a handcrafted object takes precedence, reducing the subject matter to a signifier or an opportunity. In other words, they fall neatly, as so many contemporary works do, somewhere between representation and abstraction, belonging to neither, but willing to serve a viewer who is ready to be reminded it’s both a copy of nature and a work of art.

Jeff Juhlin’s works at Salt Lake City’s ‘A’ Gallery. Image by Geoff Wichert.

Jeff Juhlin’s new work are included in ‘A’ Gallery’s August exhibition, August 15 – September 13.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.