Oda Jaune - Once in a Blue Moon

Recently having turned thirty, the Bulgarian artist has now set up home in Paris, a city which echoes her own poetic and tormented universe. Under the title Once in a Blue Moon, her exhibition includes twenty-odd works that straddle the space between surrealism and expressionism, and whose feigned naivety is often profoundly disturbing.

Deformed pin-ups, drowned children, nightmarish bridal couples… her paintings provide us with troubling scenes of intermingled gentleness and violence. They speak of a total lack of inhibition and demand that same self-abandonment from the viewer. In the words of the artist: “I can perhaps salve the viewer’s fear […] I try to extract what is good, beautiful or even funny from my subjects, laden as they are with fear or prejudice.”

Fascinated by the theories attributed to Aristophanes in The Banquet, according to which the origins of love lie in the splitting in half of beings who then spend all their time searching for their lost other half, Oda Jaune adds: “I try to exteriorise a thought, a feeling, something that a person hides within them […]; some things exist and we have no idea what they look like.” In her search for the missing piece, she reveals elements that themselves have no shape.

Born in 1979 in Sofia, Bulgaria, Oda Jaune has lived and worked in Paris since 2008. The artist uses her work to portray a tormented yet deeply poetical world. In it, images that are tender, naive and violent, occasionally erotic and funny, are mingled together as Jaune continues her frank exploration of a subconscious freed from convention. Her paintings are unsettling, putting the viewer in a position where abandon is the only option and inhibition is futile.