Becoming. Landscapes of Transformation

There are moments no one prepares us for. They are not crises or collapses. They are something quieter: when a way of being no longer fits the person one is becoming. And then something difficult to process begins. It is not about becoming someone else, but about reconfiguring oneself.

Jessica Abou Nassar’s paintings emerge from that moment.

They do not illustrate transformation or narrate it. They make it visible for what it is: an inner structure in process. A system reconfiguring itself layer by layer while life continues moving forward.

Using spray paint on canvas —a technique that allows no correction, requiring each decision to be made in sequence with no possibility of return— Jessica constructs compositions of rigorous symmetry, organic forms and chromatic gradients that, at first glance, appear harmonious. And they are. But it is a harmony that does not precede the painting: it is built through it. Each layer is a decision made under tension. Something is covered so that something new can emerge. Something disappears without ever fully vanishing. Every curve —soft, precise, recalling both the body and organic structures found in nature— is the result of a search that did not previously exist.

Symmetry does not function here as an aesthetic device. It operates as a tool of regulation. The human brain finds rest in symmetrical forms —it searches for them in faces, living organisms and natural structures— because they carry a promise of balance. Jessica uses this with precision: her centered compositions, strict bilateral structures and luminous cores invite the viewer into that promise.

The forms articulating these compositions resist clear identification. They evoke bodies without literally being bodies, membranes without becoming cells, passages with entrances but no evident exits. Opposing forces coexist within them: expanding forms alongside angles that create tension, delicate layers holding an internal pressure that never fully resolves. It is precisely within this tension that Jessica’s work moves beyond apparent harmony. An impulse that connects her practice to a parallel lineage within art history: that of artists who have attempted to give form to what cannot be seen.

The luminous geometries of Agnes Pelton, the invisible diagrams of Emma Kunz, or Thought-Forms itself —Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s 1905 book that sought to illustrate the shapes thoughts and emotions might assume in space— all share that impulse. Not as metaphor, but as hypothesis.

Jessica’s work belongs within that lineage. Yet where those practices emerged from elaborate systems —cosmologies, sacred geometries, codified energetic investigations— her paintings arise from something more immediate: the need to give form to emotional states for which words do not yet exist, in order to understand and assimilate them. To allow what cannot be spoken to at least take shape.

BECOMING speaks about adapting to change and finding harmony within it. About the moment when tension becomes form. And form becomes beauty.