Artor Jesus Inkerö - Between Cheeks (2025)

Between Cheeks

2025

NOON Projects

Los Angeles, CA, United States Of America

https://noon-projects.com/Artor-Jesus-Inkero-Between-Cheeks

At the core of Between Cheeks is an exploration of poetry and language’s power to critique, shape, and forge society and history. Inkerö’s series of autobiographical poetry paintings merges text and materials, using narrow horizontal canvases as a site for experimentation. Furniture and house paints—chosen for their connection to bodily fluids and domesticity—are scraped, layered, and painted over, evoking the cyclical nature of lived spaces, like apartment walls being repainted after a breakup. The poems, dripped and smeared onto the canvases in a process reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s action painting, create a visceral interplay of text and texture.

Works such as Can we talk tonight? and In the park And by fire we found a mutual Sense of us… evoke inner dialogue or conversations between new lovers, while Before this we just licked them and On this flat earth we lay reflect the fragmented ways we encounter language in modern life—through text messages, tweets, stranger-than-fiction news headlines, safety signage, and gossip. Inkerö’s works also engage with the historical canon of queer art, referencing Derek Jarman’s autobiographical paintings on HIV/AIDS and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ text-based installations that span entire galleries.

The exhibition further investigates metaphors of gaps, orifices, and holes, extending these ideas to themes of loss, ambiguity, and openings. These concepts resonate in Inkerö’s film A Taste of Every Dish You’ve Ever Eaten, commissioned by Somerset House in London. Created in collaboration with Juulia Haverinen and Sam Taskinen, the film combines poetry, operatic soundscapes, and a fragmented narrative. Described by Inkerö as a “poetic meditation” on memory, identity, and sensory experience, the film’s lyrics and dialogue reverberate throughout the gallery, reinforcing the exhibition’s focus on ambivalence and fluidity.