Jess Valice @ Carl Kostyal

In Jess Valice’s recent paintings, it’s usually the eyes you notice first. Huge, heavy-lidded pools, resolute and weary, as if their owner had lately gone through something but was nevertheless holding on, engaging the world. But then, by contrast, there’s the ears: oversized, sometimes mismatched in colour and on occasion reddish, the artist deliberately clowning herself or her subjects. The who’s-who distinction is ambiguous; Valice’s portraits can look like near-dysmorphic caricatures of her own features, but even in double portraits, everyone she paints looks somewhat like her.