Artist File
Abstract artist Julia Dault
THE ARTIST: With titles like Compound Interest, Le Commensal and The Young and the Restless, you immediately sense that Toronto artist Julia Dault is high-spirited and engaged with pop culture. Her titles point to the duality between high and low culture: admissions and acceptances of the things that influence her on a daily basis. This playful language allows her abstract works to live in the high art world with an informed lightness.
While Julia creates within an abstract language, her goal has been to highlight the artist’s hand within her work. Though some abstract art can look mechanical, Julia’s work strives to reveal the human touch through imperfections and her characteristic mark-making.
THE WORKS: Working in both painting and sculpture, Julia uses a wide array of materials: leather, vinyl, velour, and oil and acrylic paints are all employed regularly. These unusual materials differentiate her work, creating variety through her pieces. “My two favourite questions are What if? and Why?” says Julia. “This way of working is a fulfilling, lifelong experiment in finding purpose and meaning at nearly every turn.”
The Young and the Restless (2018) highlights Julia’s geometric interest with its repeated block form shape. The overall effect is monochromatic with the teal shade taking centre stage, but in a closer inspection, another painting is visible underneath. The yellows and reds come through at uneven intervals, suggesting that something lies beneath.
Instead of mixing paints for the underpaintings, Julia works with the colour as it comes directly from the tube. This forces her to paint within a given palette, rather than having a preplanned vision of how the colours will look in the end. She often includes a frame in her work that acts as an extension of the painting. Sometimes it continues in the same pattern, and sometimes it clashes; here, the blue almost acts as a border to stop the work from bursting out.
One of the techniques Julia employs most is sgraffito (an Italian word meaning “to scratch”), which consists of applying layers of colour and then scratching them off to achieve texture and pattern. She often uses squeegees, foam blocks and sponges to create the
desired texture and aesthetic, building up layers of paint and colour, and then removing the top-most, still-wet layer in order to create the forms and patterns. Compound Interest (2020) exemplifies this technique. The soft pink and blue geometric pattern underneath is still clearly visible, but Julia’s large, sweeping shapes on top add another layer. The shapes aren’t fully formed, and there’s no sense of symmetry: in these imperfections lie Julia’s desire for the viewer to see her presence. I find the distinct difference between the foreground and background particularly characterful; it seems the artist is purposefully upsetting the hierarchy between the two.
In a recent online exhibition with Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, Julia’s works focus on the relationship between dependence and independence. I love Le Commensal (2019-20), which consists of a reworking of 15 frames and uses her signature style of paint application and removal.
Julia works within the confines of “rules” — she loves to find spontaneity within boundaries. When everything is allowed, nothing is surprising and, thus, to Julia, it’s not a fertile place to work from. “I make the rules, and I also have free rein to break them,” she says. “My work thrives with experimentation and discovery.”
COLLECTING: Julia’s pieces are in museum collections including the AGO in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. She has participated in solo exhibitions at institutions such as Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto’s The Power Plant and White Cube in London, U.K. Works start at $6,000US.