Eliza Goodpasture on Jen DeLuna
Art in America
May 20, 2025
With the swipe of a huge brush, Jen DeLuna blurs her paintings before they can dry, freezing the image in a hazy moment. She describes the effect: “It’s like that feeling of memory fading, like something you can barely grasp.” Indeed, the works have a powerful feeling of uneasiness about them. Based on vintage found photographs, their combination of movement and stillness is inherently painterly.
DeLuna’s practice is refreshingly formalist and intuitive. She justifies certain decisions by deciding simply whether she wants, or doesn’t want, to do something. Others have called her work “glamorous” or “violent,” comparing it to fashion photography, Gerhard Richter’s work, and plenty more. She finds describing it herself much harder. “To imbue so much meaning into my work feels so decadent,” she said. She had never seen Richter’s blurred photo works, or painters with styles like hers, before developing her own practice as a BFA student at Carnegie Mellon University. Now, she says, all she sees online is work that looks like hers, because “that’s how the algorithm works.” – Eliza Goodpasture