David Jager on Jen DeLuna
Whitehot Magazine
September 15, 2024
In the back-room Jen DeLuna’s watery, seemingly found images of women are as remote and flat as Alvarez’s surface are heaving and muscular. They treat the subject of intimacy as well, but at a remove. Looking at them one has the uncomfortable feeling of happening across a private trove of erotic or personal photographs. Like Alvarez, they are also paired with snarling dogs, which seem to be a stand in this show for either supressed passion or unspoken feminine rage. Maybe both?
She also paints her ever so slightly blurred photo realist subjects with an added layer of glossiness, similar to the effect of Vaseline smeared on a TV camera lens. ‘Rallying Sigh’ seems to catch a woman in just such a position of blurry introspection. ‘Between Two Summers” shows a woman stuck in mute recollection. Generally reserved for glamour shots, the glossy highlights on her portraits only helps to disorient. With the dogs however, fangs salaciously bared, the glistening highlights only amplify their ferality.
DeLuna borrows from the visual language of cinema and television, in other words, but only applied in ways that dredge up uncomfortable feelings. “Timid Repetitions” appears to be a moment of unrestrained frolic, but it is framed like an image paused on a videotape. The woman looking excitedly off to the side gives us no sense of place, no sense of relation. A sense of vertigo or fear creeps in when you look at her. Are we even sure she is, in fact, not shrieking in terror? – David Jager