Julie Oakes
Gentle Bondage
Renaissance, Sensuality and Feminism

Beauty, obsession, passion. All these describe the recent works of artist Julie Oakes. An artist who sees herself constantly in a state of flux, Oakes has moved from the traditionally based format which has informed her works for the past years, toward a new format of shape, color, text and image.
The works intentionally reference the techniques and concerns of Renaissance art, derived from them, yet moving away from mimicking a style, and bringing the works into a contemporary framework. The materials used are the traditional media of past generations. Specific references are made to techniques of the Renaissance period: vellum, parchment or Fabriano paper, canvasses prepared with rabbit-skin glue, Bologna gesso, and natural pigments (roso di Venezia, indigo, Caravaggio green, ochre and black). Through this involvement with materials, lush, rich velvet grounds are laid out with saturated pigments. In the paintings, meticulous renderings of scripted Italian text are overlaid with sensuous and romantic imagery, at once obscured and revealed. The writings which appear on the drawings are written in English. They are printed lightly on the page, difficult to read and follow and the drawings are hung at a higher level than usual. Within the universal symbols of love and eroticism the artist develops a personal, visual vocabulary.
The influence of the Renaissance features prominently in the work of Julie Oakes. It was a time of great change in European society. Artists were no longer strictly confined to religious painting. A return to classical subject matter, and exploration of myths and stories presented a challenge to the artist's imagination. Not bound by fact, imagination became more important than historical reportage, and figures could move freely in space.
Oakes's choice of the artist's name Titian, or Tiziano in Italian, is compelling. As Oakes has stated, she could have chosen Michael Angelo, or any other Renaissance artist, however Titian embodies the kind of work which people easily recognize and often associate with an artist of a particular stature: the definitive artist's name.
A parallel can be drawn between Titian's work and the works of Oakes. For example, in Titian's masterpiece, Bacchus and Ariadne, the fable of Ariadne is portrayed, deserted in the Naxes by Theseus, who is "startled from her melancholy" by the advent of the young, handsome Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry, and his crew. Like the Italian text presented to Oakes's North American audience which tells the sensuous story of the contemporary artists Titian and Angelo, one can appreciate the work without knowing the story. William Gaunt, in his book Painting and Graphic Art, describes the painting: "The contrasting movements of Ariadne and the young Bacchus leaping from his chariot impart a tremendous buoyancy and lightness of feeling... while the general plan of form and color is so bold, the subject gives Titian freedom to introduce a multitude of beautiful details: a splendid landscape distance, animals in beautiful coats, a sly faun in whose hair the artist has minutely painted a white flower." Similarly, exotic and fantastical creatures such as monkeys and gargoyles appear in surprising and odd places throughout the works of Oakes, referencing historical and geographically exotic places. There is a Bacchanalian sensibility in some of the works included in the exhibition.
The Renaissance was a period in which the discourses of representation, sexuality and morality were beginning to meet in representations of the female nude. One intriguing female Renaissance artist emerged during this time (1559), Sofonisba Anguissola, a gentlewoman who was encouraged by her father to pursue her studies in art and who was a contemporary of Titian, Michelangelo and da Vinci. Anguissola's profane portraits were highly regarded, however Anguissola's age and sex prevented her from engaging in an aesthetic dialogue which revolves around the Napoleonic concepts of the metaphoric relationship between paint and beauty, the earthly and the sublime, the material and the celestial. Other female artists, appearing slightly later, such as Elisabetta Sirani, Portia Wounding her Thigh, 1664), and Artemesia Gentileschi (Judith Decapitating Holofernes, 1618), drew more freely on the classics and mythology. (Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art & Society)The Napoleonic influence on sixteenth century painting further instilled ideals of form and classical concerns. "In his Theologia Platonica, Marsilio Ficino had argued that physical beauty excites the soul to the contemplation of spiritual or divine beauty As painting began to record a more sensuous ideal of beauty, writer like Agnolo Firenzuola, author of the of the most complete Renaissance treatise on beauty, published in 1584, described the preferred attributes of female beauty. The description of the noblewoman with fair skin, curling hair, dark eyes and perfectly curved brows, and rounded flesh recalls a number of paintings of the period, including many by Titian."(Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art & Society)
In these works, Oakes searches for the 21st century perfect form: male and female, the images projected are idealized. With the addition of images of woman's lingerie, the traditional, conservative view of female sexuality, where the female is on display and adorned for the pleasure of the male, is illustrated most evidently in the series of drawings in the exhibition. Here, a leg is measured, exposed and presented before a fully dressed male; a mask hides an identity, real or imagined, and is removed. The difference is in the confidence of the woman, and of the woman as a full and participating partner in the process. Unlike female artists working in the Renaissance period, she is free to explore her own sensuality with confidence and a lack of embarrassment.
The bed is an image clearly charged with sexual, political and sociological symbolism. Flowers, although metaphors for feminine sexuality and reproduction, are often juxtaposed with images of death and vulnerability: the skeleton of a bird, bones whitened and fragile, white roses, often a symbol of death as well as purity, are washed out, stark against a black background. Beneath many of the works lies an undercurrent of threat: sharp thorns project from the stems of exquisitely rendered roses; feathery softness opposes the pointed end of a quill; an axe hangs next to images of desire and words of love and passion.
On first reading, the overall images are layered, often monumental in scale, traversing over the shaped canvasses and boundaries of color. Yet, they are also often broken down into fragments, reconstituted, and scaled toward the intimate. The bold, shaped canvasses offer an appeal to the eye, with shapes such as spurs and the provocative image of the heel of a woman's boot (also a reference to the Italian flag, and the "heel" of Italy) project from the canvasses, leading the eye either in to or out of the works, as directed by the will of the artist. Rhythms and harmonies of forms and color, expressions of movement, light and shade, resonate throughout the works' ordered groupings. This strong, graphic presentation and the artist's confidence in handling her materials works well with the duplicity of the imagery: romance and threat, life and death, love and its absence.
At once feminine and masculine, hard-edged and soft, the work, as a whole, captures the enigma that is the often tenuous and volatile relationship between human beings.


Susan Brandoli
Director/Curator