J. Carino: Carry It With You

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce J. Carino’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, Carry It With You, which opens to the public on Thursday, June 26 and will be on view through Friday, July 25, 2025.

J. Carino’s (b. 1988; Littleton, CO) paintings examine humanity’s relationship to the natural world, and further a queer perspective through sweeping, sensual vistas of body and landscape. Through portrayals of nude subjects out in the open, Carino takes a stance of peaceful transgression and resists societal constraints placed on queer people, on masculinity, and on nature all at once. The artist draws heavily from the terrain of the American West in his visual language, recognizing his home territories of Colorado and California as loci of nature’s power. In Carry It With You, Carino joins together the individual tableaux of his paintings to create a single visual epic: a tale of paradise, cataclysm, and hope that positions queer people as the main actors in a new American myth.

The story of Carry It With You begins in a pastoral and bucolic frontier, where Carino’s subjects live in communion with the land and with one another. The Futurist-tinged “Eden” and expansive “Peaceable Kingdom” show a society in repose as figures lounge, embrace, and bathe; relaxed and seemingly unaware of a specter looming in the wings. This world takes inspiration from Riverside, California, where Carino lives today. The wild donkeys that accompany the artist’s figures reference those that live among the canyons near his home. Originally brought Westward as work animals, they roam the hills today in a “natural” state; newly wild, yet not endemic.

The peace of Carino’s realm is short-lived, torn by floods, fires, and movement seemingly unleashed from everywhere at once. As disaster rocks Carry It With You, so deepens its parallels to the environmental shifts faced by communities in California and beyond, as well as its allegory for the global precarity of LGBTQ safety. Carino’s men gather bundles of wood and flowers, rescuing vulnerable animals from rushing waters as they flee. These figures find space for care within the distress of this upheaval — in “Flood,” one figure scoops up a foal from a rushing stream; “Carrying Beauty” shows a mournful figure who scatters wildflowers behind him as he moves. Here, humanity is shown reckoning with nature’s will and with their own impact on the landscape, bearing the load of responsibility for how their surroundings have changed.

“New Beginnings” and “After the Flood” offer a glimpse at renewal, tinged with warm tones that signal the dawn of a new era. After this arduous journey, Carino’s society finally replants the seeds of peace, establishing a new home amidst a changed landscape. Together, these anonymous figures rebuild their utopia and reconstruct their relationships with nature and one another, and, with hope, build towards lasting peace.

Carry It With You navigates a world of shifting visual references, evocative of the churn of a modern disaster-focused news cycle. The peace and chaos in these paintingsis conveyed through a collision of styles: a sublime dissonance of Japanese ukiyo-e waves, Art Nouveau patterning, Regionalist forms, and Expressionist texture. The central thread in this global quilt of histories are 1930s New-Deal-era murals, especially those commissioned by the Works Progress Association. Often, these murals depicted soldiers, farmers, and workers as the players in a one-sided narrative of America’s founding — a perspective Carino challenges while echoing their capacity for storytelling. Carino’s “American Progress,” the climax of Carry It With You, shares its title with an 1871 work by John Gast, whose notion of progress is inverted: where Gast showed pioneers driving railroads and electric wires Westward to new frontiers, Carino shows an Eastward movement of dismantling, recovery, and escape. This community rallies a procession against their erasure, reframing “progress” as gestures of tenderness and protection as they move towards a peaceful land visible in the distance. In this way, Carino’s narrative finds its resolution through healing over conquest; community over division.

Across the works on view, Carino muses on what queer people carry with them: the simultaneous burden and provision of queerness itself. Sticks and wood are bundled into faggots for building and for kindling; a cheeky and sincere simile the artist invokes for the ways queer people gather to create pleasure and possibility. The artist invokes this notion of community in response to a rising sense of anxiety — of urgency around climate change and the erosion of legal protections for LGBTQ people. In the face of uncertainty, Carino looks for ways to hold space in a landscape that seems to constantly shift underfoot. This intertwined narrative of humanity and nature reframes calamity and disarms fear, asking audiences to look past the horizon, towards which they carry all they need to build utopia.

J. Carino has presented solo exhibitions at Rhodes Contemporary, London, UK; Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY; Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles, CA; Monti 8, Latina, Italy; and Auxier/Kline, New York, NY, among others. Carino has presented work in group exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; Vardan Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles, CA; and BEERS, London, UK, among others. The artist participated in residencies at the Art House San Clemente Residency, CA, in 2023; and PM/AM, London, England, in 2024. A painting by Carino recently joined the permanent collection of the Bakersfield Museum of Art, CA. The artist holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design. Carino lives and works in Riverside, CA.