ODA JAUNE, FROM THE INSIDE


“I saw myself in the mirror!…. My image wasn’t in it… and I was in front of myself! (…) Then all of a sudden I started to see myself in a mist, at the bottom of the mirror… It was like the end of an eclipse. (…) I had seen it! “Amazed, the character of Maupassant then sees in his mirror the reflection of another, that of the Horla, impossible to repress. A double, coming from the Self, which founds the Freudian theory of The Disturbing Strangeness. It is this feeling of seeing the stranger emerge from the intimate that Oda Jaune’s works inspire. Our unconscious crushes violently against his canvases and exposes itself without modesty to the sight of all. Yet, after the stupor, no disgust, no fear, Oda Jaune plunges us into a dreamlike universe, a floating and protective world, that of a maternal body in which the members unfold and metamorphose.

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It is tempting to compare this place given to the intimate to the work of surrealists. But we would be quite far from the artist’s wishes, who even refuses the comparison. For rather than materializing psychic energies, or portraying the unconscious, Oda Jaune reveals – far from automatism – ideas that she associates, layer after layer, day after day. Freedom is its spearhead, not to deny itself anything and thus let the antinomies come together. In Oda Jaune’s paintings, the pulpits are therefore waxy, the scarlet meats, the bodies are subject to the influence of time, wither and slacken despite the apparent youth of their faces. Mouths are vaginal slits in which the fingers slide, the limbs liquefy to better merge. This oxymoronic painting combines our emotions and creates in the same pictorial space, a place conducive to syncretism, where eroticism and disgust, fear and tenderness, realism and lyricism are intertwined.

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So of course, with all these muscle packages piled up here and there, the connections are easy… After the surrealists, it’s instinctively Francis Bacon I think of. The writings dedicated to him invite me to do so “It would be foolhardy to see this as a sign of any predilection for the atrocious or the unusual. Rather (…) it would seem that the desire to touch the very bottom of reality pushes Bacon, in one way or another, to the limits of the tolerable. “Like Bacon, Oda Jaune uses plastic disturbances of reality and, like him, “his figuration awakens the idea of a presence, instead of remaining confined in the equivocal zone of false pretence”. Because Oda Jaune does not paint simple, ill-fitting bodies, what she represents is the fusion of body and mind, the gush of interiority on the surface.

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Visuels :

  1. Chaire masque, 2015, huile sur toile, 150 x 130 cm. 
  2. Éclipse, 2015, huile sur toile, 130 x 200 cm. 
  3. Être chairs, 2013, huile sur toile, 190 x 280 cm.
  4. For All to See, 2010, huile sur toile, 170 x 160 cm. 
Camille Bardin
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