A Room of Her Own

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To experience Oda Jaune’s paintings for the first time is to encounter an unplaceable mythology, followed by a rush of references from the surrealism of René Magritte to the uncanny valley of A.I., Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, and the pillowy world-building of Colette Lumiere. The familiar parts of the Bulgarian-born artist’s fantastical portraits congeal to uncanny ends, and bodies undulate human to animal, singular to plural. In E like Eve, 2023, Bulbous, fleshy growths drip, as do ice cream cones in F like Fatty, 2023, melting and morphing into curious shapes one degree removed from the familiar.

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At Templon gallery in New York, “Miss Understand” is the first solo exhibition in the United States for the Bulgarian-born Neo-Classical, Surrealist painter who trained in Germany and lives and works in Paris. In the show, striking new oil paintings and watercolors form a lexicon of imagery that finds fertile ground in the ineffable nature of femininity. The modern idea of womanhood is not beholden to gender in Jaune’s work, nor are any other conformities associated with the binary way of thinking. She is the sum of a spectrum, everything at once: male and female, young and old, romantic and explicit, primal and cyborg-like, a smooth exterior and an in-side out, fleshy underside. Look closer in and you will find realistic renderings of nipples and eyes, zoom out and the forms they are affixed to might surprise.

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Patterns are everywhere, the alphabet is spelled out in the titles and recurring symbols underscore and undercut throughout. A doll’s head is affixed to a naked body in B like Barbie, 2023; elsewhere zoomorphic gorillas, snakes, and puppies burst through human forms across the canvases. Fingers hover in front of candle flames and eyeballs, and flower stems protrude from a face in T like Tender, 2023. Bodies are birthed, cradled, sprawled out, contracted in fetal positions. Women float in negative space; they are engulfed in flames and clouds, transfigured into angel wings and—in A like Apple, 2023—an iPhone.

Jaune’s images hint at worlds of their own—and of a world downstairs. On the lower level, small watercolors flank the walls. A series of more immediate and intimate gestures that proceed the larger scale works. A bird emerges from a woman’s mouth; a baby wears a breast as a hat; a man gazes seductively out of the frame, a red-painted pout peeks out of his soft mustache. Draped billows of dusty mauve curtains give way to a womb-like bedroom. Inside, a bed is framed by furniture. Disfigured, cancerous bodies are cannibalized in anatomical chairs: legs jut out of one. A wooden mobile with various objects (an apple, a fish) hangs above a rock-like circle with a screen glowing at the center, playing a film where raw eggs, oils, and soaps are dropped in painterly compositions upon a clay doll’s face. An eerie, lullaby-like cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror” sets the mood.

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Here, the walls are washed in dramatic sunsets and clouds, soft and sweeping yet slightly ominous. A rack of gowns hang to the side of the entrance, and white feathered wings and blood-red stains hint at a grotesque whimsy not of this world. A chess table sits on the floor, its hand-made pawns arranged in mid-game positions. Sketch books, bowls of flowers, floor pillows, and candles all evoke a nostalgic and familiar sense of girlhood—only to be upended by a sculpture or a raw, bumpy chicken resting on a nightstand by the bed.

Jaune’s universe is lived in. The bedsheets are crumpled, alluding to a presence in the room. Who inhabits this space? What does she look like? The answer, more often than not, tends to be the viewer themself.
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"Oda Jaune: Miss Understand" is on view through March 9, 2024 at Templon at 293 10th Ave, New York, NY 10001.