Expressions and Reflection: Jessie Darnell at Louche Ops

Jessie Darnell, "Bonn H-231/2544" (40 x 20 cm.), oil on canvas, 2025.
(All images courtesy of the gallery)

Jessie Darnell: Spectator 
5 April - 7 June 
LOUCHE OPS
Viktoria Luise Platz 6
10777 Berlin

By JEFFREY GRUNTHANER May, 2025

The recent works of Jessie Darnell are mysteries in broad daylight. Collectively titled Spectator, this word takes on a layered, almost ironic significance in reference to the paintings currently up at Louche Ops. While "spectatorship" tends to carry the connotation of triumphal detachment, the "spect" underlying "speculate" is equally apparent in these paintings. Each one is something like a mirage registering the withdrawal of subjectivity into a placeless ether that clings to the physical canvas like a tulpa—an entity rendered real through intensely imagined detachment.

"Milwaukee A-7420C" (30 x 40 cm.), oil on linen, 2025.

Jessie Darnell, "Spectator" (installation shot).

In this highly reflective, highly mediated exhibition, Darnell paints women sourced from pre-internet personal ads—sex workers of all stripes who placed advertisements in magazines (somewhat like what Only Fans is today, but with the guarantee of sex implied). The strangely alluring quality about these paintings is how they express eroticism and detachment simultaneously. The sexuality featured here isn’t pornographic (if anything, it’s more archival than demure), but it’s palpable, even somewhat over the top. It’s mediation mediated by how Darnell depicts gendered figures as anonymous subjects. 

"New Jersey A7208-C" (20 x 31 cm.), oil on canvas, 2024.

Building her images from quick daubs of oil paint, she baits formalist concerns that short circuit a too easy access to desire and sexuality. Bodies are often concealed behind symbolic scrims. There’s a warmth and intimacy to how Darnell handles paint, coupled with an aura of depersonalization that radiates from the absence of faces in these works—the very center where one might think to find some kind of confirmation about the libidinal stakes at play. 

"Wuppertal 0202" (60 x 40 cm), oil on linen, 2025.

Darnell sets up a sort of game of mirrors that leads viewers in different directions at once. In one painting titled Bonn H-231/2544 (2025) a blond figure looms heavily against a green backdrop. She's wearing lingerie; her face is obscured to an extent where it lacks any distinguishing features apart from the gestural immediacy of paint and pigment. But there's still a personable air to the way she's poised: jaggedly supine, leaning back for her photo—a precursor to the “selfie” long before the word had any currency—her stylized presence engenders a discursive wave that glides over the painting, spelling out something more than surface-level details can account for. 

"Tampa 1182-F" (30 x 40 cm.), oil on linen, 2025.

Darnell’s recreations layer a specific kind of painterly attention (psychological, speculative) over the original photos. Toeing an emphatic line between anonymity and intimacy, her expressionist brushwork not only serves to personalize each painting, but suggests the very conditions under which these women had to conceal themselves in the first place.

"Spokane H203/560" (30 x 39.5 cm.), oil on linen, 2025.

"Spectator" (installation shot).

As scopophilic as they might at first appear, these paintings actively disrupt voyeuristic satisfaction. The viewer’s gaze is redirected—sometimes it's blurred, sometimes it's forcibly fragmented—in terms of the particular kind of closetedness demanded by the profession of prostitution itself, fraught as it is with (to borrow words from Bataille) "all things linked to deep sexuality...blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty."

"Mexico City 006939" (30 x 24 cm.), oil on canvas, 2024.

In a work like Mexico City 006939 (2024) what stands out is not the central nude figure—faceless and almost spectral—but the impasto swaths of paint that environ her. In this particular canvas, the materiality of paint and pigment carves out the pillow, sets sections of the bed in relief, and generally lends a superadded weight to the inanimate, commodified world that frames the woman in the picture. Here, Darnell’s figure seems less like a figure than a kind of displaced backdrop—a residual trace surrounded by the accoutrements of sex for hire.

"Chicago 24-1512-F" (39 x 50 cm.), oil and collage on canvas, 2024. 

"Detroit G-443" (30 x 50 cm.), oil on canvas, 2025.

For all that, it would be inaccurate to say Darnell’s paintings are about objectification. They function more like a layered system of relations, where reflections are redoubled, but never quite in symmetry with exploitative desire. The act of painting, in Darnell’s hands, becomes a way of holding space for something that resists completion, clarity, ownership. She doesn’t "humanize" or further "dehumanize" the women she depicts. Rather, her methods translate the ritualistic paraphernalia of pornography (the beds, the lingerie, the postures) into invocations of voyeurism's entrenched opposition to mirroring—noting how the latter, as a gesture of witness, might undermine the former. WM