The show entitled About Face with almost no faces featured in the works?! Figure-based visuals in which the objects and setting are the ones creating the atmosphere and narrative?! Add bold bright color palette and confident flowing line work and we're all about Woody De Othello's current online show, which is presented via Karma until March 30th.

"These works are about moving on, confronting one's self," Othello told Juxtapoz about this coherent suite of six oil-on-canvas paintings, made between 2020 and 2021. Borrowing the name from a command from his Reserve Officers' Training Corps training during High school days, the entire body of work is about facing the circumstances and then turning the other way in order to move on, move forward. This deeply emotive and intimate state is portrayed through a series of cartoonesque images dominated by human subjects often hiding their faces behind their hands. It's these exaggerated limbs that are suggesting the mood of the scenes, as they conceal the window to the soul or the facial expressions of the protagonists. In addition to that, the objects, which California-based artist often explores through animation and anthropomorphization in his sculptural practice, hold the key to a larger narrative. "I'm aiming to create a space where the figure and the environment are on the same plane, there's no hierarchy between the two," the artist explains his concept. "Space where the environment and the surroundings are just as integral to convey the emotional/psychological state being expressed by the figure or some external presence."

Utilizing the feedback between the objects and architecture and their human counterparts, Othello is able to portray the intangible atmosphere existing beside the physicality of the scene. The bright, often candy-like colors and droopy simplified visuals bent under the weight of invisible pressure are creating a captivating tension that both pulsates with energy while appearing deflated or exhausted. The emotive condition becomes as real as the material world inducing them, with the shadow in Out of Body, Out of Mind (2020) disconnecting and living a parallel life alongside its source, or the exhaustion of the insomniac in Sleep Patterns (2020) causing for detachment of his body parts and a dream-like fragmentation of his surroundings. Such effect is accentuated with the fluidity of both object and subjects, making such emotions earn almost animated qualities, as they bend or melt both the subjects and the objects surrounding them. "I've been thinking about water a lot, it's been coming up in reading, music, and in my personal life. I've been thinking about reflection as a result of thinking about water and that's been coming up indirectly/ metaphorically in the work." De Othello told us about the possible conceptual source of his liquid aesthetics. —Sasha Bogojev