FIGURE OF SPEECH: Talks on painting /Jana Euler
Figure of Speech: talks on painting is a Lecture series initiated by the Studio for Figurative Painting where painters whose work has a bias towards figuration are invited to speak on their practice.
Jana ‘Euler does not give interviews’, so saith the internet, not once but repeatedly. As little information this phrase speaks of Jana Euler and her work, it speaks volumes about the standard research technique of Google it.
The internet is like an old horse barn, the rafters dripping with fly paper blackened with the bodies of deceased insects. Allow me to further extend this weak metaphor… these dead flies or nodes of info (yes, info, the informal) are not going anywhere, trapped, stuck, permanently there for the revisiting. It makes sense to me why Jana does not do interviews, why add to the calcified ‘truths’ that replicate lazily in an endless game of Broken Telephone.
So, I offer no truths, or researched facts only my impressions.
10 years ago, I received a call from a friend asking if I was going to the private view at the Cabinet gallery that evening. He like the free beer that was provided at openings, so this call was not out of the ordinary. He then added, ‘you’ve got to see this show’! So strange he said this? He never mentions the shows, you see, he’s an art photographer and spends his days documenting the art of others, resulting in a blasé attitude to the content of pretty much all exhibitions. To my friend the work of artists acts as an everchanging decor to the free bar. Yet, Jana Euler’s show, When Expectations Meet Needs, registered and registered hard. Before I arrived, I wanted to dislike it, cloaked in cynicism I wanted to cock a snook at Jana’s show, to place it into some base taxonomy and in doing so dismiss it. But as soon as I passed though the threshold of the gallery it was clear to me Jana Eluer’s work and her as an artist are truly special, further out on a limb than anyone else and done so without the promise of redemption. This hammer blow of an exhibition was not a one off, again and again without repeating or becoming a pastiche of herself she ups the ante. When I saw images of Great White Fear at Neue Gallery it was as if I was seeing a classic historically affirmed exhibition in real time.
Jana is speaking this Thursday 18th of May, come and listen and let her words atomize and disappear.
Alastair Mackinven