Close Looking No. 11: Jelly
Christina Habibi
Jelly, 2026
24 × 30 × .75 inches
Acrylic, spray paint and oil on canvas
Painting details & availability →
Jelly came together with unusual speed. There are paintings I have to circle for a long time, but this one seemed to arrive almost all at once.
That immediacy remains in the painting. Marks collide and overlap, gathering into a larger presence while retaining lives of their own. I can see the image as a whole, then suddenly lose it to one of its parts. Something that seemed structural becomes independent, and what felt like a single form begins to multiply.
I'm interested in that relationship between the whole and everything contained within it. We move through the world as apparently complete beings, but our interior lives are far less singular. Thought doesn't proceed neatly. Memory interrupts the present. Desire contradicts reason. Instinct operates alongside everything we've learned about how we're supposed to move through the world.
There's an animal quality in Jelly that makes me think about that instinctive part of ourselves. It feels older than language and less interested in explanation. I don't see it as something we've left behind. It travels with us.
That idea of traveling together became important to me as I looked at the painting afterward. The parts may pull in different directions visually, but they don't necessarily seem to be going different places. There can be a shared orientation without agreement, a sense that everything is being carried along by the same larger movement.
I think about that beyond the painting too. We tend to imagine progress as something orderly, as though knowing where we're headed should make the path clear. But most periods of real change don't feel that way from inside them. Culture can appear fragmented, even chaotic, while countless individual movements are still responding to the same pressures and searching for some sense of direction.
The same may be true within ourselves. We can contain competing impulses, memories and versions of who we've been without each one belonging to a separate journey. They move with us. What appears fragmented might actually be a different kind of whole, held together less by resemblance than by direction.
The speed with which I made Jelly feels connected to this. I was drawing with an almost childlike abandon, following one mark into another without stopping to consider what the accumulating image might become. The painting found its direction while I was inside the act of making it.
Maybe we don't always need to see the destination to recognize that something is carrying us toward it.
Sometimes direction is the thing that holds the pieces together.