In his review of works by Issy Wood, Barry Schwabsky gave a name to a genre of figurative painting which has become increasingly popular in recent years: “perverted realism”: 

Somewhere between realism and surrealism sits […] perverted realism. It draws on traditional, even ostentatiously conventional representational styles in order to estrange them […]. ​​Painting of this sort is almost by definition dark in temperament. But much of it is chromatically dark, too, conjuring spaces full of shadow and murk… It’s easy for this kind of art to go wrong, dependent as it is on a precise sensitivity to the correct ratio between the banal and the sinister.

This is a helpful way of approaching the work of Chicago-based painter Noelia Towers, whose solo exhibition Opening an Umbrella Indoors is on view at de boer Gallery in Boyle Heights through February 26th. The potential of this kind of work lies in its ability to pervert reality. This is not to say distort reality, to make it into a “cruel illusion,” but transform it: to manipulate and reconfigure reality according to one’s impulses and for its own sake. It is an approach with a deep history in modern art.

Self Help is a painting which at first I did not much like, if for no reason other than I found the title on the book read by its subject “How to Stop Suffering (Immediately)”, to be too silly and quaint. But there is much more to the painting besides those words. The figure’s extended left leg acknowledges the viewer’s presence, just as surely as it ignores it. Each tenderly rendered object maintains a cold, ersatz character, bringing to mind the crisis of the general and particular. The most striking element is the obscured face: the position of the book is just far enough to the side for the viewer to assume that slivers of her lips and eyes should emerge, but they don’t. Instead the audience is left to assume that her face is simply blank.

In all seven of the paintings in which the artist paints herself, her face is obscured. The anonymity is sometimes enhanced by the wardrobe of these characters: here, a schoolgirl; there, a prototypical postwar housewife (apart from a latex BDSM mask); elsewhere, a cosmopolitan woman fitted with a Parisian trench coat and black leather gloves. Again, the nature of the general and the particular become problemicized. Anonymity is a tool with which Towers produces a sense of voyeurism. And — at least in those pictures with a human subject — this voyeurism becomes an important factor in Towers’ ability to navigate “the correct ratio between the banal and the sinister.”

In Remember Me, a woman in a funereal blouse with black sheer gloves holds a pair of gleaming oversized fabric shears against a bunch of Madonna lilies. Her head and lower half are beyond the frame of the painting. Her torso is almost completely obscured by the flowers and scissors. The hands give the character her subtle personality. Her right hand gives an air of discomfort and anxiety. The middle finger strains upwards while the index clamps around the scissors, balancing their weight. Taken all at once, the hands struggle towards a composed appearance under the weight of the shears. They express our figure’s withdrawal, her interiority, and her insistence on presentability. She requires an undoubtable outward image in order to resign within. Towers is following Courbet here: the hands of his figures often play a leading role in animating his realist pictures. 

When Hercules was an infant, he nursed from Hera’s breast while she slept. His agressive suckling woke her from her slumber and her milk sprayed across the sky and the earth, creating the milky way among the stars and fields of white lilies on the land. The archangel Gabriel would offer Mary one of these lilies when announcing to her that she would bear the son of God. In Towers’ painting, it is the Madonna lilies which the figure uses to shield her breasts. The powerful and conflicting themes of maternity — of the beauty of new life — and funereal grief (the black blouse and gloves, the cold etiquette of the figure’s pose), set up the perimeter of a tragic narrative which is nevertheless withheld from the audience. But the painting is all the better for it. Throughout Towers’ work I find that what she doesn’t paint proves to be as important as what she does paint. It is left for the viewer to bridge the gaps with the use of their own imagination. She invites the audience to play along. The invitation, the withholding, the enigma, Towers’ painterly skill, and her almost literary talent for narrative: all of these work together to create compelling myths and pictures.