The Painter Using Bare Jute as His Light Source

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 06, 2026 | 4 MIN READ The Painter Using Bare Jute as His Light Source At a Glance Daniel Correa Mejía makes the brightest part of his paintings the part he never touches: raw jute left bare to glow between a field of ultramarine and a field of red. The unpainted ground is doing the hardest work in the picture. The brightest thing in a Daniel Correa Mejía painting is the part he didn’t paint. A band of raw, brown jute runs between a block of ultramarine and a block of red, and that bare fiber is what glows. I’ve been reading him this week, the Colombian painter based in Berlin who Galerie ran in their “Artist to Watch” series on May 29. His gallery, PPOW, puts the method plainly: Mejía “leaves areas of the jute canvases unpainted, using the fabric itself as a light source.” That one sentence is the whole painting , and it’s worth slowing down on, because it inverts something most painters never question. Why leaving the ground bare is the hardest decision in the painting Almost everyone primes the support and buries it. You size the cloth, lay a white or toned ground, and from then on the picture is built on top, the light bouncing off the paint film and, in the transparent passages, off the white underneath. The support is plumbing. Nobody is meant to see it. Correa Mejía throws that out. He keeps a coarse, dark, brown jute and lets its own value be the lightest event in the picture. That sounds simple. It is not. Raw jute is low in value and warm in temperature, so to make it read as light he has to keep everything around it pitched so the bare fiber wins the contrast. One wrong note next to it and the brown stops glowing and just looks like unfinished canvas. The margin is tiny. The part he leaves bare is doing the brightest work in the painting . There’s a second thing happening, and it’s the part a colorist notices first. Ultramarine and red sitting edge to edge are a problem. They’re near-complements at full strength, and butted together they buzz, they vibrate at the seam, they fight for the front of the picture. The usual fix is to put something between them, a neutral, a value step, a cooled transition. Correa Mejía’s neutral is the jute. The warm, mid-value brown is the connective tissue, as PPOW describes it, that holds the two charged colors apart so they ring instead of clash, while its single shared temperature quietly unifies the whole surface. The unpainted area is not empty. It is the most considered color in the painting , and it happens to be the one he made by leaving paint off. That’s why this reads as a real material system and not a look. The restraint is documented in the work itself: Maureen Paley describes “a limited palette of ultramarine and red oil paint that is applied on jute,” and the dimensions stay modest and consistent, work to work. One painting , Lo primordial, is oil on jute at 90 by 60 centimeters. This is a painter who decided what his picture is made of and then held to it. For a collector readin