Motion: Selome Muleta at Jan Kaps, Cologne
Motion is the first exhibition by Selome Muleta at Jan Kaps. Working primarily as a painter, Muleta has repeatedly depicted solitary women in moments of self-attention and solitude. In Motion, these figures are all nude, enclosed in domestic spaces — mostly bedrooms — and surrounded by sparse elements: a lamp, a chandelier, and fields of charged color. They appear suspended, inhabiting a heightened state of interior focus. These women are mid-spasm, mid-stillness. The compositions register both softness and tension: gestures hang in the air, surfaces shimmer, and their forms carry traces of something unresolved. They glow with leftover heat — as if what just happened, or what is about to happen, has quietly left its mark.
The focus is the body — twisted legs, knees pulled in, arms folded in a protective stance. Around them: minimal rooms, marked only by a bed and a faint suggestion of walls. Though they lie in beds, they aren’t resting — they are short-circuiting. These spaces feel less inhabited than staged — arranged not for comfort, but for the act of being seen. In most of the works, the face is hidden — turned away, cropped out, or buried behind a curtain of black hair. The figures appear bare, unprotected, but self-contained. While skin is exposed, expression is withheld. The result is a kind of visual game: the viewer is given clues but no conclusion. Are these women slipping into sleep, sighing or chuckling to themselves? Their presence is intensely certain, their state of mind sealed. They give everything, and withhold as much, they are present and unknowable. They mark thresholds — between touch and thought, between visibility and vanishing.
With the face hidden or turned away, Selome Muleta shifts the responsibility of expression to the body. Her figures don’t speak or gesture openly; they fold into themselves, stretch out, retreat. In the absence of eye contact or facial expression, it’s posture that carries the mood — not through theatrical poses, but through minimal shifts in weight and placement. A bent knee, a turned back, an arm across the stomach: these become the grammar of the painting. The figures appear quiet, shifting between comfort and discomfort, but something lingers — a trace of impact, a withheld reaction. What they are thinking remains unknown, but their physical form insists that something is being felt, intensely.
Muleta’s paintings resist an obvious narrative. Their silence is not neutral. The decision to center female bodies in enclosed spaces — to give them visual weight without explanation — is already political. These women are not pictured in motion; they resist stillness all the same. They do not work, serve, or perform. Their purpose is self-sufficient. In contexts where visibility often comes with expectation, their ambiguity becomes a form of agency. They are visible, but inaccessible.
Throughout the exhibition, a quiet struggle plays out between vulnerability and control. The nudity in these works is unceremonious. The figures appear alone, relaxed, but not necessarily safe. Their bareness feels neither symbolic nor seductive — it simply is. There’s no suggestion of shame, but neither is there comfort. The skin is open, unguarded, and something unsettles the frame: the glint of a lamp, a pool or streak of red, a pose held too long. The image names nothing, but the figure carries its own record — of something physical, emotional, or both. If there is violence here, it is not visible. It sits just beneath the surface, like a pulse.
The sexuality here is quiet and unruly. It isn’t performed. It leaks out. It sits in the curve of a hip, in the way a thigh rests against a sheet. It is intimate but not shared — not with the viewer, nor anyone else. This erotic presence is not for seduction or transaction. It is not glorified, but it is claimed. The body is not overcome by desire. It holds it.
In this way, Muleta’s work treats sexuality as containment — a charged, interior force that refuses display. Her figures think, feel, and sometimes bleed, holding the complexity of their position without explanation. The result is an image of power drawn not from control, but from concentration. It lives in the ordinary tension between interior life and external view, between what is seen and what remains withheld.
She paints women on the edge of disappearance — not from fragility, but from intensity. They shimmer with excess. Applied by hand, the paint shifts — tender, brutal, honest. Muscles dissolve into mist. Flesh turns fluorescent. The body blurs into the air around it.
Nothing here asks to be understood. These women are not signs. They are states. Conditions. Facts. You’re not meant to decode them. You’re meant to withstand them.
