Artist Virginia Jaramillo with her painting Site No. 3 51.1789 N, 1.8262 W (2018), from her “Foundations” series.PHOTO STAN NARTEN/COURTESY HALES, LONDON AND NEW YORK.
Virginia Jaramillo’s abstract paintings are energized by a simple premise: “How can I draw in the viewer? How can the artwork hold their attention?”
For her most recent body of work, Jaramillo is delving into what it might look like to take a scientific principle and transpose it to canvas, which she said is connected to her lifelong fascination with science fiction—“I could just let my mind wander”—and her years as a kid in the 1940s and ’50s perusing the Reader’s Digest column “Towards More Picturesque Speech,” which was “filled with such colorful language that it made you visualize these words.”