What conflict
leaves behind
Gijo paints the surface, then carves into it.Residual emotion, given form between the planar and the relief.
Paint and chisel —
the feeling that remains
Gijo is a visual artist whose subject is, before anything else, what conflict leaves behind. Not the conflict itself — not its noise or its event — but the sediment that settles once it has passed: the residual emotion that stays in a person after the argument is over, the relationship has shifted, the room has gone quiet.
Gijo gives this aftermath two bodies. One is flat painting — the worked surface, colour and mark laid onto a plane. The other is painted wood carving — wood cut, shaped, and then coloured, so that feeling is not only depicted but physically taken out of the material. Between the two Gijo keeps a deliberate conversation going: what the brush can only suggest on a surface, the chisel can press into depth.
To carve is to subtract. A gouge does not add to the wood; it removes, and what remains is defined by what has been taken away. This is an apt grammar for an art about residue — the form that is left once something has been lost is, in a literal sense, the form Gijo is after. The painted surface and the carved relief become two ways of asking the same question: what stays in us after the conflict has gone.
Gijo works as a resident artist at the Dalcheon Art Creation Space, a working residency that gives the practice its room and its rhythm — the slow, repeated labour that both painting in layers and carving in wood demand. It is from inside that working life that these objects emerge: planar and carved, coloured and cut, each holding the quiet weight of what is left behind.
Major themes
- 1
What conflict leaves behind
Not the conflict itself but its residue — the emotion that settles in a person once the event has passed.
- 2
Painted surface and carved relief
Flat painting and painted wood carving held in conversation — what the brush suggests on a plane, the chisel presses into depth.
- 3
Carving as subtraction
To carve is to remove; what remains is defined by what was taken away — a fitting grammar for an art about residue.
Practice & residency
- Resident artist at the Dalcheon Art Creation Space.
- Medium: flat painting and painted wood carving.
- Subject: the emotions left behind after conflict.
Three essays —
on residue, surface, and the cut
1Residue — the subject is the aftermath
Most art about conflict reaches for the conflict — the clash, the rupture, the dramatic moment when something breaks. Gijo's work begins after that moment has already gone. The subject is not the storm but the silence that follows it: the particular feeling that stays in a person once the argument is finished, the relationship has changed, and there is nothing left to do but live with what remains.
This is a quieter and harder subject than conflict itself. An event can be depicted; residue can only be held. The feeling left after a conflict has no clear outline — it lingers, dulls, resurfaces, settles. To make it into an object is to ask how something so formless can be given a form without being falsified, without being made louder or neater than it actually is.
The answer is to treat the emotion as material rather than as scene. Gijo does not illustrate the cause of a feeling but works the feeling itself — layering it onto a surface, or cutting it out of wood — until the residue has a body one can stand in front of.
2Surface and relief — two bodies for one feeling
Gijo works in two media at once, and the pairing is not incidental. Flat painting and painted wood carving are not simply two things Gijo happens to do; they are two ways of approaching the same question, each reaching where the other cannot.
On the painted surface, feeling is suggestion. Colour bleeds, marks overlap, and the plane holds a kind of atmosphere — a residue read across a flat field the eye can travel without obstruction. The painting offers breadth: the wide, even spread of a mood.
In the carved relief, feeling becomes depth. Where the brush moves across, the chisel moves into. Wood is cut, shaped, raised and recessed, and then colour is laid over the carved form, so that light catches the ridges and pools in the hollows. The same emotion that the painting spreads out, the carving pushes down — and the work as a whole lives in the conversation between the two: surface and depth, brushed and cut, planar and dimensional.
3Dalcheon — the slow time of the studio
Gijo works as a resident artist at the Dalcheon Art Creation Space. A residency is not a backdrop to a practice; it is a condition of it. To carve wood and to build a painting in layers are both slow forms of labour, and slow labour needs a place that holds steady around it — room, time, and the permission to repeat.
Both of these media reward patience. Carving cannot be rushed; a cut, once made, cannot be unmade, so the hand must move with the deliberation of something that knows it cannot take anything back. Painting in layers asks for the same composure — each pass settling before the next, the surface deepening by accumulation rather than by force. The residency gives this rhythm somewhere to live.
It is from inside that working life that these objects come — neither sketches nor statements but things made over time, each carrying the quiet weight of what conflict leaves behind. The studio is where the residue is given its slow, deliberate body.
Between the painted surface and the carved relief, Gijo pursues a single, patient question: how does one give a body to the emotion that conflict leaves behind? Gijo joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — so that the proceeds of the work might become a low-interest lifeline for artists facing financial exclusion today.
Selected Works
1 works are featured here.
Gijo joined this campaign in solidarity with fellow artists. Every work sold flows directly into the artists' mutual-aid loan fund— a purchase becomes the next month's lifeline for an artist navigating financial exclusion today.
