Jamie Luoto: Upon Black Plains | Salon

 

We watch as latexed hands grope and pinch at the flesh of a naked woman lying on a white crumpled sheet. In many ways, it’s a scene that we’ve encountered hundreds of times, that we have absorbed through stories, images and lived experience. And yet, to witness it in Jamie Luoto’s paintings forces us to consider our position within these cycles of abuse and trauma. We are confronted, whether we like it or not, by the fact that looking is never neutral.

 

Upon Black Plains, a solo presentation of three paintings by Luoto, continues her ongoing investigation into the psychological aftermath of sexual trauma: how trauma takes hold of the body, shapes perception and persists long after the fact. As often with her paintings, these works draw on art-historical reference points, which here serve to underline the persistence of women’s oppression and abuse. Luoto highlights how centuries of depictions of such violence throughout mythology and art and also current affairs has had a numbing effect on many responses to, and interpretations of, these kinds of events.

 

Sleeping Venus byGiorgione/Titian, for instance, is one of the earliest instances of a woman’s body depicted not merely within a landscape but as landscape itself – property to be conquered and owned. Venus’s mythological status and her sleeping state ostensibly grant us permission to gaze. The supine figure in Luoto’s paintings takes on a similar undulating composition, though she appears not in a pastoral scene but in a surreal space: a cavernous, undefined blackness closing in around her. The imperfections of the body – the folds of skin, body hair and bitten, bloodied fingernails – point to her humanity, as well as to visible manifestations of anxiety and struggle. More unsettling is the presence of flies, a sign of decay, which destabilises any certainty as to whether she is, in fact, even alive. 

 

Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare provides another key reference, drawing out ideas of control and possession. In Fuseli’s painting an incubus sits upon the woman’s torso, physically claiming ownership over her unconscious body. In both There Lay the Days Between and In Purposeless Wanting, a similarly oppressive presence is visualised through a condom – a recurring motif in Luoto’s work – hovering over the woman’s body, large enough to contain or smother her, while disembodied hands in black latex gloves creep out of the darkness, wrapping around her neck, pinching her nipple and pulling apart her thighs.

 

Cats appear throughout Luoto’s works as familiars and guardians, but in these paintings they are overwhelmed by the encroaching hands, leaving the figure even more vulnerable to manipulation. In There Lay the Days Between, a riding crop emerges from the bottom of the canvas, drawing away the cat’s attention as hands spread across the woman’s buttocks, and fingers, covered in a white, creamy substance, reach up to meet her own fingertips – a horribly intimate gesture that collapses the boundary between violation and selfhood. While the black latex and the riding crop may initially evoke the visual language of BDSM, the flies and the figure’s unconscious state shift the scene into a far darker register, where it becomes unmistakably clear that whatever is taking place is without the woman’s consent.

 

Luoto’s latexed hands also nod to Pluto’s unyielding grip in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s celebrated sculpture The Rape of Proserpina, contrasting with Proserpina’s own hands, which push the god away, flailing in open space for help that does not come. One such hand appears as a ghostly echo of women’s unanswered cries hidden within the sheets of Luoto’s Upon Black Plains. Here, again, the woman's body is conflated with land or territory, forming a mountainous backdrop in front of which three horses stand. The horses act as a metaphor for the female body, but they are also objects themselves, their glossy surfaces suggestive of painted ceramic – things to be collected, displayed and owned. The reappearance of the riding crop, laid across the woman’s buttocks and thighs, once again asserts masculine power, entitlement and the demand for submission.

 

While Luoto’s paintings often gesture towards a process of healing and transformation, there is a terrifying sense of entrapment in these works – not only within personal trauma and memory, but within the social and cultural frameworks that permit and ignore abuse. Encountered at a moment when women’s rights and bodily autonomy are increasingly under threat worldwide, Upon Black Plains reads less as a nightmarish vision than an exposure of reality itself: a refusal to look away.