Jason Hackenwerth’s paintings pulse with a visceral emotional charge, each canvas a raw extension of the artist’s internal landscape. His gestural mark-making—sweeps, drags, smears, and sudden bursts—captures not just motion, but sensation. The works feel less like images and more like encounters: with memory, with conflict, with transformation. There’s a vulnerability to them, an openness that suggests the act of painting is not only expressive, but necessary—a way to process the unseen forces shaping our inner lives.

The physicality of Hackenwerth’s work is unmistakable. You can feel the movement of the body in every brushstroke, as if the surface is a site of struggle or release. Thick layers build and dissolve, and fragments of text emerge only to be buried again, echoing the way emotion rises and recedes. Even in his more muted palettes, the tension between control and surrender remains electric. These are not polished or cerebral paintings—they are alive, immediate, and deeply human.