Janka Zöller⎮C'est la vie

With great ease, Janka Zöller depicts seemingly everyday situations that can be deciphered on several levels. At first glance, the small and large oil scenes look like familiar pictures. A second or third look reveals 'untold' stories, or her painting provokes irritation despite its perfect surface. With direct allusions to the French thriller "Swimming Pool" with Charlotte Rampling (2002) or the 1960s film "Contempt" with Brigitte Bardot (1963), her paintings are images of desire, in which the figures radiate ambivalent feelings. Zöller's painting touches a nerve in our contemporary society and is reminiscent of recent social satires such as the TV series "White Lotus" by Mike White or the novel "Spitzenreiterinnen" by Iovana Reisinger. Like these films, with their spectacular aesthetic effect on the one hand and their psychologically puzzling quality on the other, her painting translates this ambiguity into, for example, a melancholy facial expression, dark plant massifs that are both attractive and threatening, and a bright, opaque blue sky that is not cheerful. The special intensity of Janka Zöller's paintings is not least due to the fact that the painter cultivates a virtuos illusionist style of painting, using a variety of painting techniques with velvety, smooth or pasty surfaces in close contrast. The artist finds her motifs in photographs that she takes herself. The photographs look like selfies on Instagram, like motifs from social media that show the media's view of reality. The painterly realisation in oil gives the spontaneity of the media world a long-term dimension that goes beyond mere representation. Janka Zöller's paintings make it clear that it is precisely the illusionistic reproduction of reality that enables its interpretation through painting.