Fluorescent pink shadows: Jenna Gribbon’s Rainbows in Shadows at MASSIMODECARLO Milan

Photo by: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: MASSIMODECARLO 

By LUCA AVIGO June 27, 2025

Jenna Gribbon’s production is established and consistent enough that one doesn’t need first hand experience of her work to know what to expect from her new show. And Rainbows in Shadows, on view until September 6th at the Milan outpost of MASSIMODECARLO gallery, is no exception: vibrant paintings, photorealistic at first glance but reveal expressive, loose brushwork up close, featuring her platinum-haired partner Mackenzie Scott (better known under her indie rock author alias, Torres).

But those who’ve had the privilege of seeing her work in person—especially in a solo exhibition (as myself, with Mirages in 2022 at Collezione Maramotti and individual works in the Gnutti Beretta collection)—know that those recognizable features, know that these recognizable traits, are just the tip of the iceberg in Gribbon’s practice. 

And it’s those lucky viewers who may sense that something is slightly off, that something is missing, as they walk through the elegant rooms of Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, where the gallery is housed; even before they can pinpoint what has changed, they’ll feel that something certainly has.

It’s this absence that makes us realize Gribbon had, on a subconscious level, accustomed us to an elusive yet precise state of mind: a charged, nervy atmosphere that saturates the space, a hypersensitivity born from the quiet prickliness of each canvas, subtly putting the viewer on alert. As the artist herself put it in an interview: “I like to make [people] feel more naked. Like, ‘Oh, maybe I’m not supposed to be looking at this.’”

It’s not just about the meta-textual investigation of the artist–subject–viewer triangle, whose dynamic—“to do, to undergo, to look,” as Roland Barthes put it in Camera Lucida—is made explicit through titles that often revolve around the act of looking, as well as symbolic props like clamp lights, green screens, or mirrors. That theoretical layer only works because Gribbon likes pointing a finger at the viewer, to keep them at a certain distance: her true strength lies in her ability to portray almost exclusively her partner in intimate moments while conveying anything but romanticism. Because in art, everything can quickly become boring, even the most sincere emotion and the most astonishing technical skill.

If it was her recognizable style and sensuous subjects that brought Gribbon into the spotlight, it’s her talent for unsettling the viewer that has kept her there and kept each new body of work alive and compelling. And it’s precisely that talent that she seems determined to let go of in her latest show.

Jenna Gribbon, S walking home from school, 2025, oil on linen, 30.4 × 22.8 cm, courtesy: MASSIMODECARLO 

Any lingering doubt is dispelled by the press release itself, written entirely by Gribbon’s partner Mackenzie, who channels her Torres authorial skills to express her most tender feelings: “Our heaven is the home we’ve made together—my wife, my stepson, our dog, and me.” “On my family’s frequency you will find us reveling in our power and our joy.” “The splendor is […] in the way my stepson is cloaked in coziness, safety, and basking in the warmth of candlelight and a robe as we all play a post-supper tabletop game together.”

A tone quite far from what the artist herself has said about her practice: “A reluctance to be painted was something I was really trying to get into the work”, or “I don’t feel the need to deproblematize beauty, and I actually want the work to exist in a slightly sticky and uncomfortable place.” 

So it seems like Gribbon is ready to lay down her weapons and warmly embrace the viewer. But why would she? What if she doesn’t actually want to? What if she intends to thin the tension and conceal it better, deepening her inquiry by burying it in sincere affection?  

Maybe this is a way of letting us get closer only to prick us deeper, maybe it’s all a trick.

Or maybe it’s not. What’s certain is that the current political moment is more than enough to motivate a queer American artist with a family, a public voice and a medium to make an affirmative turn in their work, to transmit a clear message instead of posing questions.

But it’s also true that the most effective art is that which questions and discomforts, something Gribbon has so far shown herself both able and willing to do.

Jenna Gribbon, Prismatic Rituals, 2025, oil on linen, 233.6 × 182.8 cm, courtesy: MASSIMODECARLO 

And in fact, if one doesn’t stop at the haze of coziness and vulnerability that Rainbows in Shadows exudes, if they manage to push through, they can find various gravitational nuclei, moments of painterly tension that seem to confirm there is still, deep down, the will (or instinct) to go beyond the work’s stated goal.

The question remains whether this dilution results from compromise, an irrepressible instinct, or an intentional strategy. In the monumental Prismatic Rituals, 2025, Jenna paints herself reflected in the bathroom mirror as she photographs Mackenzie brushing her teeth. It’s an unconventionally romantic scene, but openly intimate and affectionate within the context of this exhibition, a context that dampens the voyeuristic edge that usually dominates Gribbon’s work.

The fertile curiosity that drives one to scour a work for its deepest secrets struggles to survive in the face of such an explicit, palatable message. It’s so easy to appreciate a meaning so beautifully delivered that it becomes hard to actually pay attention to it. So that what grabs the attention instead is the painting’s decline into pure abstraction, right where the smartphone that took the source photo should be reflected.

Vehement gray brushstrokes cover the area to reject the work’s photorealism and its fidelity to reality itself; a luminous orb at their center draws the eye to this anomaly, manifesting its significance (as does its repetition in another work, Kaleidoscopic Normalcy, 2025).

Less obvious but equally compelling is the mirrored cabinet door, which—being at an angle—reflects an adjacent portion of the canvas (like a Rorschach blot). There, Gribbon precisely replicates her brushstrokes, subtly revealing how her seemingly spontaneous, gestural style is in fact carefully considered and meticulously controlled.

Jenna Gribbon, Kaleidoscopic normalcy, 2025, oil on linen, 233.6 × 182.8 cm, courtesy: MASSIMODECARLO 

This dynamic recurs throughout the show, with visual jolts that snatch our attention before it drifts amid too much eloquence: the faithful replication of other artists’ works (Kim Gordon’s Cherry Picker, 2024) or Gribbon’s own (I want everything. I’m swept away, 2021), nonchalantly placed at the edges of her canvases, challenging the apparent immediacy of execution and spontaneity of the scene’s composition; her son Silas’ gaze, dark and impenetrable in Watching Little House on the Prairie together, 2025 and Kaleidoscopic Normalcy, 2025, which lights up in vibrant tones under direct illumination in S confronting the light, 2025, implying that emotional nuance in a pictorial subject’s gaze hinges entirely on the physical light that reveals it.

Jenna Gribbon, Is it the brightness or the darkness that draws you in?, 2025, oil on linen, 30.4 × 22.8 cm, courtesy: MASSIMODECARLO 

Jenna Gribbon, M and her looming shadow, 2025, oil on linen, 233.6 × 182.8 cm, courtesy: MASSIMODECARLO 

 

And then, of course, there are the fluorescent pink nipples: Gribbon’s signature, omnipresent again here, appearing in five of the thirteen paintings, ranging from apple sized clumps—as in the imposing close-up of  a nude Mackenzie M and her looming shadow, 2025—to microscopic specks, visible only thanks to their glow—in Is it the brightness or the darkness that draws you in?, 2025, a floral still life behind which we glimpse the painting of an elderly naked woman from an Agnès Varda film.

Literal puncta, intentional irritations to the viewer, there is no doubt about their purpose. And for those still in doubt, Gribbon spells it out (in an interview for Juxtapoz): “People forget that it’s a depiction of a person that they are consuming, that they are in a voyeuristic position. Which is kind of why I started using the fluorescent pink nipples. It was a way to make the viewer like, a little uncomfortable, a little self-conscious. […] I guess I want people to kind of own their pleasure in looking. And you know, question it, but also recognize that it’s not benign”.

Photo by: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: MASSIMODECARLO 

Maybe it’s just my personal disposition—seeking confrontation and inquiry in every work of art and feeling disappointed when I don’t find them—or maybe it’s my trust not just in Gribbon’s talent and emotional and ethical depth but above all in her validity as an artist capable of using her medium to its fullest potential; but for me, the fact that the same pink she’s made us accustomed to seeing on her muse’s nipples—a magnet forcing us to look where we’re not supposed to—appears in her son’s eyes, in a moment of pure familial intimacy and vulnerability, is the smoking gun. It’s right at the centre of S confronting the light, 2025, in Silas’ right lacrimal caruncle, disrupting our enjoyment of the tenderness portrayed and the rich palette of his iris.

Even in Gribbon’s most seemingly harmless image—the gaze of a mother towards her child—we cannot fully surrender to the empathy of the moment, because we, as viewers, are made aware that we contaminate its purity.

And if the artist sacrifices the purity of her familial cosmos for us, it’s only right that we feel the weight of our parasitic role. Looking is a predatory act, and we art goers are used to feeding on images. Gribbon has the rare ability to turn us into prey, and even if it might seem that with Rainbows in Shadows she has lost her teeth—and perhaps that was her intention—I suspect she has not lost her nature, her vocation to painting (neon pink) shadows in rainbows. WM

Jenna Gribbon, S confronting the light, 2025, oil on linen, 152.8 × 121.9 cm, courtesy: MASSIMODECARLO