She dares as subjects, the baroque, even the grotesque (in her self-portrait like a selfie), while evoking the challenge of an economic world always focused on “more”. Like this shark emerging from the water in a painting taking exactly the shape of the acronym of the Deutsche Bank with a blue dash diagonally in a black square that she decorated with tears.
“Euler thus gives substance, explains the curator of the exhibition Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, to a vitalist and expressive figuration tinged with a singular sense of burlesque. A priori banal motifs feed an iconography of opulence and fantastical scenes.
guillementA painting which firstly refers to itself.
A painting which refers first of all to itself, to painting placed in the abyss. We see it as much in his hyperrealistic paintings of a monumental (female) power outlet, air conditioner grilles or a gigantic beer mug as in his deliberately blurred paintings of people fleeing to who knows where. She often mixes different painting techniques in a virtuoso manner: layers, sprays, etc.
Geys, Murillo, two artists with “the ambition to still be able to change the world through art”
The question of gender
At the beginning of the exhibition, a painting is located on the border with abstraction where it evokes the departure of an ancient Greek statue.
At the entrance too, its large painting of a unicorn horse running backwards, with multiple horns, is also an allusion to the fact that “unicorns” is the name of emerging high-tech companies. A frantic race of the economy against the wind!
She also addresses the question of gender painting brushes that have become women and at work in her parents’ dentist room or paint bombs that have become men and painting each other.
She placed against a wall a school of dozens of biting white sharks, mouths open, in ceramic (which we saw at the 2022 Venice Biennale).
When she is interested in coffee, in the coffee machine that she paints large like a portrait of a fountain, it is another way of finding a subject of pure painting but also an allusion to the coffee drug among executives and a reminder of the colonial past linked to coffee. Around it, she displays coffee beans taking on a strange and somewhat sexual dimension.
Ariane Loze or the pleasure of crossing points of view
Jana Euler designed this exhibition as a total work (a Total work of art). She drew like a large boulevard covering the entire floor diagonally and she called her exhibition “Olympics”contraction of Oil (oil painting) and Europa. Also referring to the‘Europe Avenue, this imaginary boulevard connecting the European district of Brussels and the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, the two cities where she resides. At the end of the aisle, a little man representing the world is slumped against the wall.
She also imagined the “furniture” for the exhibition: a stone bench in the shape of a question mark and a dollar, and another bench in the shape of a unicorn carrying beer glasses as horns!
Jana Euler, at Wiels, Brussels, until September 29
