A portray by Jana Euler options on the duvet of the Spring 2025 “Wellness” subject of Artwork in America. Beneath, see an interpretation of the work, proven right here in full.
When Jana Euler debuted her 2016 portray Crammed (well being / magnificence enhancer) at Cupboard Gallery in London, it was one in every of 4 renderings of “empty” faces, as she referred to as them in a textual content she wrote for the present. These clean visages—eyes eclipsed by cucumbers, a vacant smiley face, and two watch faces hollowed out—concurrently evoke issues one would possibly enlist to attempt to fill the proverbial void. In Crammed (faith), 2016, a elaborate wristwatch standing in for luxurious is painted as if prolapsed, its upside-down numbers radiating out from the circumference and spilling off the canvas, its straps extending into the watch’s emptied heart, wanting like a receding freeway.
One other portray within the present titled with two citation marks surrounding a void—„ ” (2016)—caricatures the expertise of attempting to view your personal physique in complete. We see each a part of a brown-eyed lady—her nostril large and blurry from up shut, her toes far-off—as if peering by means of her nostril as she appears to be like up. Entrance and rear views body a central void, providing completion with out coherence.
As for our gherkin-goggled cowl lady, this white lady on the spa—that quintessential picture of wellness—is seen by means of two inexperienced circles that overlap like a Venn diagram, converging as issues do when held near your face. Overlaying the entire portray, they function a kind of membrane, and belong, it’s implied, over the eyes of the viewer.
Crammed (well being / magnificence enhancer) is definitely Euler’s least ugly portray. As Rachel Wetzler described on this journal in 2020, Euler’s works have a tendency towards “the viscerally off-putting, grating, or garish,” in ways in which usually “itch.” Certainly, pictures of luxurious wellness will be grating, not least for the inequities they embody. It is usually price including that for Euler, who’s German, wellness is much less of a luxurious than it’s in the US. In Germany, well being care is a human proper, and even saunas are municipal. I’ve questioned how this colours Euler’s notion of such imagery however can’t ask, because the artist doesn’t give interviews.
For me, although, this picture of wellness at present—after the rise of each Goop and the GOP—the translucent cucumbers resonate in another way than they did when Euler first painted them. Audre Lorde wrote in an essay that “caring for myself just isn’t self-indulgence, it’s self-preservation, and that’s an act of political warfare,” a quote too usually remoted from her level {that a} preserved self is healthier outfitted for motion, not exempt from it. In instances like these, caring for our well-being requires no small quantity of upkeep, and it issues that we are likely to it, as long as we forgo cucumbers so opaque that we are able to now not see whether or not the world is on fireplace. Few of us can afford this and, anyway, as Euler so wryly suggests, self-care just isn’t sufficient to fill the void.
