Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, there are rare moments when art grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go. Oda Jaune’s pictorial universe is one of those. Oda Jaune, a Bulgarian living in London after traversing Germany and France, surprises me every time in a way few artists have. In her exhibition “Oil Of Angels” held at Galerie Templon Paris from March 8 to May 3, 2025, we find ourselves face to face with work of a stunning rarity that pierces the superficial layers of our collective epidermis.
When I look at her canvases, I feel the flesh pulsating. Not that stereotyped flesh we see everywhere, but an ambiguous, indeterminate flesh that slips between the human and the other, between the sensual and the unsettling. Oda Jaune is a painter who knows how to get her hands dirty with the grit of existence. She dissects our emotional anatomy with surgical precision and does not hesitate to expose its palpitating entrails. With her, we are far from Instagram aesthetics and its smoothing filters. We are in a universe where beauty and ugliness dance an eerie tango.
The central piece of the exhibition, a monumental canvas five meters wide titled “M like Mother” (2023), presents a hybrid body with a rounded belly nestled between four casually reclining feminine legs on a table. Above, a winged arm protects a fragile newborn, suggesting the power of unconditional maternal love and its ability to overcome all obstacles. This work commands admiration for its narrative density and remarkable pictorial treatment. The details are there, vibrant, in this canvas that evokes both flesh, placenta, and a pitcher of immaculate milk, a representation of the first meal, the source of life.
If Oda Jaune seems obsessed with flesh, it is not for simple provocation. It is because this organic material constitutes the very site of our experience in the world. As Julia Kristeva wrote in “Powers of Horror”, the abject is that zone of indistinction where the boundaries between inside and outside, between self and non-self, are blurred [1]. Oda Jaune explores precisely this shifting border, where bodies transform, hybridize, and reflect our own fragility.
By working in the lineage of old masters while drawing inspiration from surrealism and German expressionism, Jaune operates a subtle shift. She uses classical technique to represent what precisely escapes classification. This appropriation is not just a stylistic flourish, it is a genuine philosophical strategy. Julia Kristeva explains that abjection is linked to “what disturbs an identity, a system, an order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” [2]. Jaune’s hybrid creatures embody exactly this identity disturbance, this unsettling strangeness.
The philosophy of Julia Kristeva helps us understand what Oda Jaune does when she blurs the boundaries between beauty and monstrosity. For it is not a simple aesthetic provocation, but a profound interrogation of what founds our humanity. When Jaune paints these fragmented bodies, these transformed flesh, she confronts us with the abject, with what threatens our physical and psychic integrity. But paradoxically, it is through this confrontation that we can access a form of catharsis, an acceptance of our finitude.
But where to place Oda Jaune in the history of contemporary art? Certainly not in those sanitized currents that too often populate galleries. I would say she comes closer to Francis Bacon, without being a mere epigone. This comparison is not fortuitous. As the critic Camille Bardin wrote: “Like Bacon, Oda Jaune uses plastic derailments of the real and, like him, her figuration awakens the idea of a presence, instead of remaining confined to the equivocal zone of false semblance” [3]. This presence, palpable, almost physical, is what gives her works their immediate impact.
But beyond Bacon, it is perhaps towards Marlene Dumas that we should turn to find a spiritual sister for Oda Jaune. Both share this taste for painted flesh as an expression of a tormented psyche. Both refuse the ease of purely decorative painting to plunge into the troubled depths of the unconscious. As the critic Rose Vidal wrote, “To be a painter, as Oda Jaune is, is to traverse as a painter an era that can no longer see painting as a tableau” [4]. It is precisely this challenge that Oda Jaune meets with brilliance.
The exhibition “Oil Of Angels” is inspired notably by the poem “Touched by an angel” by Maya Angelou and focuses on the power of love through the fascinating prism of angels, a symbol both immortal and paradoxical. Angels, these beings who transcend time and cultures, are torn from their religious context to become manifestations of our own humanity, of that good which we carry within us. As the artist herself puts it: “I wanted to see the angels in us, I wanted to visualize love, its unconditional transcendental value capable of everything!” [5].
The angel, a figure par excellence of the in-between, a mediator between the divine and the human, becomes under Oda Jaune’s brush a metaphor for our own hybrid condition, torn between materiality and aspiration to transcendence. “La Pensée”, “Piece”, “Above”, “If”, the titles of her canvases resonate like so many invitations to explore these liminal territories where binary oppositions fade away.
According to the cinematographic theory developed by Gilles Deleuze in “L’image-mouvement”, modern art is characterized by its ability to capture flux, intensities, rather than fixed forms [6]. This approach applies perfectly to the work of Oda Jaune, whose bodies in perpetual metamorphosis escape precisely any fixed identity. Her figures are never purely human or purely other, they are always caught in a becoming, in a transformation that resists any definitive categorization.
This political dimension of her work is not trivial. In a world obsessed with performance, productivity, and the optimization of bodies, Oda Jaune reminds us of the irreducibly mysterious, uncontrollable part of our carnal existence. At a time when the promising and terrifying technologies of transhumanism herald a future of augmented, perfect, immortal bodies, her hybrid, fragile, sometimes monstrous creatures oppose a silent but powerful form of resistance.
What a difference between simple provocation and true subversion! Where so many contemporary artists content themselves with shocking to make a name for themselves, Oda Jaune truly upsets our mental categories, our way of perceiving the world. She does not merely destabilize us, she invites us to reconstruct, from this initial disturbance, a new understanding of our condition as embodied beings.
The way Oda Jaune deals with feminine corporality deserves to be highlighted. Far from idealized or, conversely, victimized representations, she offers a vision of the feminine body as a site of metamorphoses, of power and vulnerable magic. As in her work “B like Barbie”, she subverts the icons of standardized femininity to show what these images hide: aging, transformation, the fundamental instability of any identity. This is what Deleuze and Guattari would call a “body without organs”, not a body deprived of organs, but a body freed from the hierarchical organization that medical and social thought usually impose on it [7].
And yet, despite the destabilizing charge of her works, there is in Oda Jaune an undeniable tenderness, a form of love for these liminal creatures she brings to life on the canvas. Her bodies are never simply objects of disgust or repulsion, they are inhabited by a life of their own, a paradoxical dignity that commands respect. This is perhaps her greatest strength: making us love what we would spontaneously reject, reconciling us with the strangeness that lies at the very heart of our humanity.
Art reminds us that we are not alone in our deepest emotions. Oda Jaune’s paintings illustrate this idea perfectly. Faced with them, we recognize something of ourselves, not our polished, socially acceptable surface, but what teems underneath, our unspeakable desires, our deep fears, our most troubling dreams. This intimate bond that she establishes with the viewer is truly moving.
In “Miss Understand”, her previous exhibition debuting in early 2024 at Templon in New York, Jaune was already exploring perceptions of femininity through history and anatomy, focusing on metamorphosis as a principle inherent to the feminine. As she explained then: “I think it is time to move away from all classifications, preconceptions, and stigmas given to women. I think it is time to broaden our understanding…” [8]. This desire to escape pre-established categories, gender stereotypes, permeates her entire work and culminates in “Oil Of Angels”.
The unconditional love that Jaune explores in this new exhibition in Paris is not a naive or sentimental vision. It is a love that engages our entire being, that confronts us with “all that we are and ever will be”, as Maya Angelou writes in the poem that inspired the artist [9]. A love that confronts us with our limits, our finitude, but which paradoxically constitutes our only path to a form of authentic freedom.
Jaune’s angels are not those ethereal, disembodied figures that populate traditional religious imagery. They are profoundly carnal creatures, bearing the mark of our fragile humanity. They recall those angels spoken of by Rilke in the “Duino Elegies”, terrifying beings, for they embody a beauty that we can bear only imperfectly [10]. It is this tension between aspiration to transcendence and anchoring in the flesh that gives her work its particular resonance.
If traditional art criticism often seeks to classify, to label, to fit artists into pre-existing boxes, Oda Jaune’s work forces us to adopt a different approach. As the artist herself expresses it: “I feel almost allergic to the idea of labeling the world, people, history, everything we try to put in a box” [11]. This resistance to easy categorization is not a mere artist’s whim, it is the very heart of her creative approach.
The time of Oda Jaune has come. In a world saturated with smooth, polished, retouched images, her paintings confront us with a raw but necessary truth: our humanity resides precisely in what resists normalization, in what escapes algorithms and dominant beauty standards. Her troubled angels, her bodies in metamorphosis, remind us that life itself is a continuous process of transformation, never fixed in a definitive identity.
I tell you, you bunch of snobs, do not miss this exhibition at Templon in Paris. It will shake you, perhaps unsettle you, but you will emerge transformed, as after an encounter with an angel, an angel not entirely proper, not entirely conforming, but terribly, magnificently human.
- Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Éditions du Seuil, 1980.
- Ibid.
- Bardin, Camille. “Oda Jaune, from the inside”, YACI – International Young Art Criticism, May 2019.
- Vidal, Rose. “In the Time of Oda Jaune”, Templon Ideas, 2023.
- Excerpt from the press release of the exhibition “Oil Of Angels”, Galerie Templon, 2025.
- Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983.
- Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980.
- Cane, Hesper. “Oda Jaune Debuts in the US with New Work Exploring Perception of the Woman in Our Time”, Widewalls, December 29, 2023.
- Angelou, Maya. “Touched By An Angel”, Complete Collected Poems, Random House, 1994.
- Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. Translated by Lorand Gaspar and Armel Guerne, Éditions du Seuil, 1972.
- Odufu, Emann. “Oda Jaune on Transformation, Divine Femininity and Magic in ‘Miss Understand'”, Office Magazine, March 15, 2024.
