This post was originally published on artnews.com
A painting by Jana Euler features on the cover of the Spring 2025 “Wellness” issue of Art in America. Below, see an interpretation of the work, shown here in full.
When Jana Euler debuted her 2016 painting Filled (health / beauty enhancer) at Cabinet Gallery in London, it was one of four renderings of “empty” faces, as she called them in a text she wrote for the show. These blank visages—eyes eclipsed by cucumbers, a vacant smiley face, and two watch faces hollowed out—simultaneously evoke things one might enlist to try to fill the proverbial void. In Filled (religion), 2016, a fancy wristwatch standing in for luxury is painted as if prolapsed, its upside-down numbers radiating out from the circumference and spilling off the canvas, its straps extending into the watch’s emptied center, looking like a receding highway.
Another painting in the show titled with two quotation marks surrounding a void—„ ” (2016)—caricatures the experience of trying to view your own body in total. We see every part of a brown-eyed woman—her nose big and blurry from up close, her feet far away—as if peering through her nostril as she looks up. Front and rear views frame a central void, offering completion without coherence.
As for our gherkin-goggled cover girl, this white woman at the spa—that quintessential image of wellness—is seen through two green circles that overlap like a Venn diagram, converging as things do when held close to your face. Covering the whole painting, they serve as a sort of membrane, and belong, it is implied, over the eyes of the viewer.
Filled (health / beauty enhancer) is easily Euler’s least ugly painting. As Rachel Wetzler described in this magazine in 2020, Euler’s works tend toward “the viscerally off-putting, grating, or garish,” in ways that often “itch.” Indeed, images of luxury wellness can be grating, not least for the inequities they embody. It is also worth adding that for Euler, who is German, wellness is less of a luxury than it is in the United States. In Germany, health care is a human right, and even saunas are municipal. I’ve wondered how this colors Euler’s perception of such imagery but can’t ask, as the artist does not give interviews.
For me, though, looking at this image of wellness today—after the rise of both Goop and the GOP—the translucent cucumbers resonate differently than they did when Euler first painted them. Audre Lorde wrote in an essay that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” a quote too often isolated from her point that a preserved self is better equipped for action, not exempt from it. In times like these, caring for our well-being requires no small amount of maintenance, and it matters that we tend to it, so long as we forgo cucumbers so opaque that we can no longer see whether the world is on fire. Few of us can afford this and, anyway, as Euler so wryly suggests, self-care is not enough to fill the void.