Movement, Space, and Art: Inside Jason Duval’s Work
Join me as she shares one of my favorite pieces from our gallery — a painting by American artist Jason Duval. Discover how Jason’s work weaves together space, movement, architecture, and improvisation, creating paintings you don’t just look at, but can enter. A glimpse into how art and embodied presence meet on the canvas.
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As many of you know, my great passion alongside movement is art. That’s why, together with Light Space Movement, I also run my gallery wildpalms, where we host incredible exhibitions that bring artists and audiences together in fresh, meaningful ways.
My own art collection is growing slowly — piece by piece, whenever I can, I collect photographs and works by artists I truly love. And today, I’d like to share one of the works we have at our gallery wildpalms with you: this painting by Jason Duval.
Jason is an American artist based between New York and Buffalo. In fact, he recently opened a gallery in Buffalo with a photography exhibition, continuing his commitment to supporting contemporary art communities.
This particular painting belongs to his 2018 series Interiors. Whenever someone asks me about a painting executed with true elegance, this is the one I think of first.
Jason’s work is deeply inspired by the intimate connection between space, the city, its architecture, and the people who move through these places — all the untold stories that accumulate and become part of a city’s living memory. It’s not the history found in great books, but a collective story: where chance encounters transform a street corner, a neighborhood, a city into something unique.
One recurring thread in Jason’s work is New York itself — not the New York of Wall Street or the movies, but the New York of the artist-run galleries on 10th Street in the 1950s and 60s, where independent spaces shaped the avant-garde and defined New York as the artistic capital of the world.
Jason understands contemporary art history deeply, and you can feel it in his work. This soft, fleshy pink, for example, reminds us of Philip Guston — who was once a central figure of the New York School before he broke with abstraction to paint in his own raw, figurative language.
Each of Jason’s paintings feels like a literary work: it tells the story of someone within that space. But it’s not just a page you read — it’s a page you can enter — because each painting is constructed through the connection of Jason’s own body with the space of the canvas. If you look closely, you’ll see: those arches are almost proportional to mine, or they open up like passages I could step through from the side.
This composition, with all its structure, also has the freedom of improvisation — Jason pulls a lot of inspiration from things like jazz music. To become a skilled musician who playfully masters instruments, one has to practice hours and hours. This gives you the freedom to improvise. Imagine musicians who sense the air where the sound waves travel, feel the audience’s response, and, thanks to their deep knowledge, create something new in that very moment — something unplanned that enriches what came before.
I also love to transfer this to my movement practice – the more you practice being in connection with yourself, your body and mind, the more you move, the better you become at responding to your bodies needs and the environment. To improvise.
It’s the same with Jason’s process: the movement of his body in front of the canvas, the reaction of oil crayon or acrylic against the surface, which invite fresh gestures, unexpected layers, and a texture that feels alive, full of energy and presence. All of it are products of deep knowledge, skill and practice.
Thank you for letting me share this piece with you today. I hope it inspires you, as it does me, to pause for a moment and feel how art, like movement, can open a space inside us — a space for connection, curiosity, and new stories to unfold.