Featured image: Land Escape, Julie Cardillo, 2025, oil and carved foam on panel, 66 x 30 in. / 167.64 x 76.2 cm.
Julie Cardillo’s bold and boundary-breaking work blurs the lines between perception and physical space, narrative and abstraction, observation and imagination.
Julie Cardillo explores surreal intersections of nature, memory, and space through layered media and shaped canvases that bend reality and perception.
Through layered media and unconventional surfaces, her practice disorients and delights, evoking surreal dreamscapes that probe psychological, environmental, and socio-political themes. In this collection, composed of “Inside Out,” “Yellow Line,” and “Outside In”, Cardillo guides viewers through surreal reconstructions of interior and exterior worlds, using color, composition, and form to dismantle traditional notions of boundaries, memory, and place.
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Inside Out, Julie Cardillo, 2023, oil and carved foam on panel, 30 x 24 in. / 76.2 x 60.96 cm.
A riot of color, texture, and layered symbolism, Inside Out is an environmental allegory rendered in oil and carved foam. The domestic interior is invaded by surreal elements: toy-like objects, sculpted plants, and a woolen deer share space under a turbulent, cloud-laden sky that literally bursts from the edge of the canvas. Cardillo’s use of foam extends the composition into the viewer’s world, emphasizing the collapse between indoors and outdoors, the natural and synthetic. Beneath its playful aesthetic lies a critique of cultural detachment from ecological systems.
Yellow Line, Julie Cardillo, 2024, mixed media, 20 x 28 in. / 50.8 x 71.12 cm.
In Yellow Line, chalk, charcoal, and watercolor converge to capture the haunting stillness of pandemic-era life. A masked figure stands against the backdrop of Bolivia’s Mi Teleférico, the world’s longest urban cable car system. With golden hues radiating around the subject, Cardillo merges the public and private realms, an interior meditation in an exterior setting. The work becomes a journal entry in visual form: intimate, somber, and reflective of a world suspended in flux.
Outside In, Julie Cardillo, 2023, oil on panel with spray painted foam, 28 x 36 in. / 71.12 x 91.44 cm.
Outside In continues Cardillo’s experimentation with dimensionality and perspective. Mounted on a shaped panel with spray-painted foam, the painting depicts an airplane tray, an iPad, a swirling fruit, and a surreal landscape viewed through the window. The boundaries between physical travel and mental voyage dissolve, raising questions about artificiality, consumerism, and environmental collapse. As with Inside Out, the tactile foam underscores the artist’s commitment to breaking the “frame” and placing viewers in liminal, disjointed terrains.
Cardillo’s work thrives in thresholds, between digital and analog, interior and exterior, past and present. Each piece functions as both portal and reflection, encouraging viewers to question their sensory realities and cultural assumptions. Her surreal visions, while whimsical on the surface, point to deeper concerns about climate, memory, identity, and our fractured relationship with the spaces we inhabit. Cardillo doesn’t just reimagine “nature”, she invites us to confront it from the inside out and the outside in.
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Red Line, Julie Cardillo, 2024, mixed media, 20 x 28 in. / 50.8 x 71.12 cm.
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