Noelia Towers’ new collection of works, “Opening an Umbrella Indoors” (all works 2021), presents a world of dichotomies: pleasure/pain, soft/hard, natural/synthetic, obscured/vulnerable. The collection of paintings is consistent in its motifs of both overt and covert sexuality, and natural flora and fauna. In each of the figurative paintings, all self-portraits, the artist’s face is obscured, either by her body-positioning, composition structure, or by objects and fabric. In this manner, the viewer gets only part of the story, and an air of mystery is added. In many ways the still life paintings help fill in those gaps and, like obscure clues, offer hints at the artist’s hidden self. Towers offers the viewers both a dead bird (Ferit de mort) and cut flowers (Remember Me and Memorial To Self). By presenting these living things that have suffered death, or certain to reach it soon, Towers plays with the theme of the death of nature, and perhaps the death of innocence. 

Towers’ painting style is in the vein of photorealism in that it is clearly based on photographs as references, and the finished works appear photogenic, but lack the hyper-realistic details present in the likes of Chuck Close. Towers’ technical strength is her treatment of different textures. In Vow Of Silence—the wood texture of the wall, the detailed lace neckline, the floral dress and shiny latex accessories—all receive different treatments that are effective in breaking up the painting composition. The attention to detail on textures also gives the paintings an editorial quality—the patent leather shoes, and lace-up boots could be pulled from images in a magazine. That said, the oil paintings have a pointedly matte finish that is accentuated by the muted color palette, and a flat, illustrative texture. Each painting also has a stark and brightly lit overexposed quality that blows out colors and adds to the photo-realistic impression. The works are all cohesive—they could easily be photos taken by the artist during the COVID lockdown of the last two years.

Noelia Towers, Self Help, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and de boer, Los Angeles. Photo by Jacob Phillip.

While only some of the paintings are figurative, each piece functions as a kind of self-portrait, as the subtle storyline woven through the paintings leads the viewer to infer that even the still-life paintings are autobiographical. By illustrating the self in fetish-ware of submissive motifs like schoolgirl and gimp, the artist’s own sexuality is presented as matter of fact, which is inherently subversive when the artist is a woman. There is also a darkly humorous, sardonic quality that’s demonstrated in Self Help, which shows the artist sitting in a schoolgirl outfit reading a book with the title “HOW TO STOP SUFFERING (immediately).” The artist is clearly playing with ideas of identity, and while the paintings are a bit tumblr goth-girl aesthetic, I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with bringing the world of e-girl BDSM self-portraits into the “art world” and galleries. Towers’ paintings are markedly of the moment without coming off as trite or derivative. Instead, they are vulnerable, risqué, cheeky, feminist explorations of the self and solitude.