Henni Alftan, O de Giotto
at The Box, ENSA Bourges
April 25–June 15, 2025

I first conceived of this project in 2023, when I began teaching at L’École nationale supérieure de Bourges. At this time, Sandra Émonet, director of the university’s La Box, asked me to curate a painting exhibition. In a global context in which figurative painting is hyper-mediated, I wanted to present the singular work of Henni Alftan, an artist whose process defies conventions related to representation and the image. 

I would like to briefly situate Henni Alftan’s practice within its own history. One that, today, leads her to say that “a painting is primarily an object hanging on a wall in a space.” In her elaboration of the pictorial, Alftan does not rely exclusively on a direct relationship to a reference image. She primarily speaks to the “object.” Indeed, for the last twenty-odd years, she has approached her work as a painter by first conceiving painted volumes, at times installed in space, at others on the walls. These volumes raise conceptual questions related to the act of seeing. They also echoed the material and semantic depth of the painting-object informed by its entire history, and thus aware that it was also a visible object in reality. 

In light of this initial context, it is interesting to note that in her more recent paintings, representations of objects are numerous. One can recognize objects of knowledge, objects of art, objects of time… These representations of significant objects invite possible interpretations akin to those invited by classical iconology, capable of revealing intentions of meaning. This appealing assumption deserves to be questioned if we pay attention to the artist’s choice of title, Stop Making Sense, for her recent exhibition at Karma gallery in New York. 

If the representations of objects create compositions with symbolic allures, they also speak to fragile appearances. I’m thinking of the numerous representations of screens, mirrors or glass surfaces in Alftan’s paintings. The visible is blurred, doubled, foggy or sometimes breaks. Objects represented [by Alftan] are often associated with their shadow, or subjected to disappearing effects, like the wheel of a bicycle in Optician (2025), which exceeds as much as is contained by its frame. This is because the format affects the composition by cutting through its edge. In Alftan’s paintings, truncating the image is often a way of

establishing a fictional aspect in the representation of objects or bodies. These cutting effects, which make the visible relative in the painting, also make the reality of the painting all the more vivid. 

Henni Alftan interprets this in unmixed hues and gradients, as well as in her brushed surfaces’ subtle and sensitive textures, which range from matte to shiny. A contrast thus arises between the straightforwardness of the forms, the frequent flatness of the colored surfaces that define them, and the absences implied by framing and cropping. A doubt thus arises in the reality of the painted scene. 

In Darkness (2024), as she adds color to a surface that we could read as a wall in the back of a space, Alftan extends the hue and its form to the edges of the frame. The edge here acts as a transitional space between the fictive plane of the painting’s two-dimensional surface and the real space of the wall on which it is hung. Moreover, as we have seen, the shape of the objects that structure the composition can be interrupted by the border of the painting. Although this is a detail, it is significant precisely because it is indicative of the artist’s playful relationship with her medium and with the ambiguous pictorial object that is the canvas. This play disrupts the very meaning of what is seen—the image—in favor of painting. Of course, each painting is an image, and to make each painting, Henni Alftan uses a sketch to determine the structure of the image in the composition. Yet, surprisingly, Alftan indicates that, before the painting, and even before the sketch, a sentence or word will inspire her choice of subject. The artist’s work places a strong emphasis on language, on translation and the meaning of words. This speaks to her attentiveness to the recognizability and intelligibility of each painted form, akin to a Platonic ideal that would hold the value of the idea of the object. From the initial idea, the words to the painted object, each work is conceived as a project of alignment between something intellectually conceived and its visible state, metaphorized by the medium of painting. 

The title of the exhibition, O de Giotto, is perhaps an opportunity for the artist to assert her admiration for another artist. But it also marks the graphic coherence between the pictorial form and the symbolic significations that structure the act of painting. The interpretive possibilities of the O are rich. The letter holds symbolic value as a sign that refers to the painter “Giotto,” but also as the one who holds the gaze. The letter is also an open form on a void, which the

imagination could fill up. Perceived as a circle, this O is also what guides the formal choices behind several paintings in this exhibition. A round table in Round Table III, a target in Aim, a neon sign in the shape of glasses in Optician, an earring in Earring, or the almost-complete letter O in BIC. 

Among these works, the one that stays particularly in my mind is the small-format Earring (2024), which depicts its titular subject. It shows a human ear wearing a golden earring. There is the painting, a body part, the representation of the jewelry and the shadow it casts on the figure’s skin. All of this seems to point to something that escapes the immediately visible. Of course, it is about seeing and the jewelry and the painting. But it is also about truly understanding the stakes of painting. It is a discipline that the artist imposes on themself. This painting depicts a part of the body, one that is open to the outside: it is an ear, an orifice. While the painting foregrounds the earring, the upper edge reveals a simplified description of what is referred to as the conch of the ear. Above the lobe, in this informal hollow, like a navel, the O of Giotto, which conveys the general intention of the exhibition finds its visual coherence in both meaning and form.

– Nicolas Tourre

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