About the artist

Jason J. Aurelio-Thomas (JJA-T) was born in Colorado, studied film in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eventually made his way to New York, where he lives and works from an art studio on the North Shore of Long Island.

His path to painting has been anything but direct. Along the way, he founded a video production and distribution company, worked in theater, built stage productions, and produced everything from corporate spectacles to elaborate celebrations as an Event Producer. Through it all, painting remained a constant—quietly present, waiting for its turn.

Over time, that practice began to push beyond the limits of the flat surface. Paint accumulated. Materials crept in. Surfaces expanded outward. Objects became embedded, buried, exposed, or transformed. What began as painting gradually moved into a space somewhere between image, sculpture, relic, organism, and theatrical artifact.

Aurelio-Thomas’s work explores the unstable territory where nature, imagination, and unease overlap. His pieces can feel geological, biological, aquatic, extraterrestrial, or all of these at once. He is drawn to the visual language of erosion, coral growth, fungi, shells, minerals, deep-sea life, decay, and other beautiful oddities that seem to exist halfway between science and mythology.

Beauty, in his work, is rarely entirely innocent. Seductive surfaces may conceal damage, absurdity, dread, or something struggling to emerge. A work may begin as an invitation to look closer and become, with time, a fragment of landscape, a remnant of disaster, a strange organism, or an artifact recovered from a world almost—but not quite—our own.

In 2022, his work received notable recognition when The Slimy Effluence was selected for the National Juried Exhibition at First Street Gallery in Chelsea, and How Does That Make You Feel? was included in the Long Island Biennial at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York. His work has also appeared in numerous group exhibitions, Open Studios, and unexpected venues ranging from office buildings to retail spaces.

The most common response to encountering his work is rarely a question about meaning or technique. More often, it is a hesitant hand reaching forward, accompanied by the words: “Can I touch this?”

Aurelio-Thomas now works full-time creating what he calls Sculptural Paintings: densely textured works that blur the boundary between image and object. They invite viewers to lean in, look closer, and rediscover the childlike impulse to explore the world through curiosity, wonder, discomfort, and touch.