Be careful not to break a mirror, or it’s seven years of bad luck. Don’t hang a horseshoe upside down unless you want the luck it holds to trickle out the ends. Step on a crack, break your mama’s back. Though they are most often recalled trivially and half-jokingly, the superstitions we abide by our entire lives are punctuated by undertones of suffering and darkness. Noelia Towers’ exhibition “Opening an Umbrella Indoors,” mines the connections between bad omens and earthly tragedies through a series of photorealistic paintings rife with displays of pleasure and pain, intimacy and mortality.

Undeniably, Towers is a beautiful technical painter. From gentle cascades of hair to the glistening sheen of leather loafers, the works are rendered in impeccable detail. Still, the hyperrealism of the paintings is hardly as striking as the subject matter itself which ranges from scenes of bondage and self-harm to cries of self-help and attempts to escape, with Towers serving as her own model and muse. By carefully omitting her face, the works (all 2021) thus become representations of our collective experiences of pain and longing.

In Vow of Silence, Towers dons a frilly floral dress and full-face leather hood and poses as if she’s about to sever her own tongue with scissors. Picnic for Two shows her in a similarly submissive position, bound from her ankles by a BDSM spreader bar and sprawled on all fours on a checkered picnic blanket while clad in white. The juxtaposition between the innocence of her garb and the unsettling anticipation of pain evident in each scene reflect the threat of impending doom despite how bright and sunny life may seem, a common thematic thread throughout the show. Mementos of death loom around every corner, particularly in Memorial to Self and Ferit de mort, which respectively depict a commemorative bouquet of lilies in a high-heeled boot and a dying swan bleeding from a fresh bullet hole.

In Bad Luck, Towers stares wistfully out an open window while holding an open umbrella indoors and a thorny rose behind her back, as if longing for freedom from the curse of misfortune. The exhibition becomes a brutally honest manifestation of fears and forebodings, many of them self-inflicted but no less real. The artworks are deeply personal, but the story Towers tells is universal and one I empathize with — that of a young woman struggling to make meaning of her life and forge her way in the world while dogged by harbingers of hopelessness, entrapment and self-doubt.

De Boer Gallery
3311 E. Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90023
Thru Feb. 26th, 2022