July 28, 2019
Since her training at National Schools of Fine Arts at the Villa Arson in Nice and in Paris, Henni Alftan has been developing photographic painting, structured by an imagination guided by fragmentation that of the image, bodies, objects and narration.
Born in Helsinki, Henni Alftan chose to settle in France to study and work. For some years she has been developing a form of painting that puts perception to the test. “I paint pictures,” she says. Nothing is ever given to us in its totality. The narrative and temporal dimension of painting escapes us. Hot air, chit chat is excluded. Alftan works on questions of frame and framing from her dally observations. In her note-books she draws details as well as the main outlines of the images she retains. From a specific scene she captures a look, a hand, an object, a silhouette, a shadow, the detail of a garment, a gesture, a pattern, a color. By endeavoring to reproduce in painting the almost invisible elements of the everyday, the common, Alftan invites us to reflect on what we see, the visible world and its modes of representation. In this sense, her works lead us to think about the image through the painting as an object its history, its timeliness, its legitimacy, its materiality and its conceptual dimension.
Alftan explores the issues inherent in two intersecting histories, that of painting and that of photography. The works on canvas are part of a traditional pictorial research: surface, depth, flatness, color object, gaze, line, composition, motif, framing, narrative (or rather the rejection of the latter), the image in the image, the mirror or montage. If her painting is figurative, it is no way part of an illusionist approach; on the contrary, synthetic, it goes right to the essential of the form, line and color. Still, photography plays an important role in the construction of her works and her way of look-ing at reality. It is particularly present in her choices of framing, which are often out of step with those usually used In painting. She says, “I’d like to see the moment when painting begins to refer to, to look like something other than it- self. That’s why I try to give only the necessary number of elements, clues. What you think is often hidden from view. Indeed, the notion of the gaze connects the issues of painting and photography. In an almost systematic way, the artist avoids direct visual contact between the figured subject and viewer. The face-to-face is avoided in favor of strange, poetic situation. The question of the gaze is recurrent: a woman in front of a mirror puts a lens to her eye, another looks at her reflection in the blade of a knife, the eyes of a man are obstructed by dark shadows, a sleeping couple is lying in grass in the shade of a tree, a swimmer turns her back. Eyes are absent, hindered, obstructed, diverted or duplicated. Thus the part of subjectivity, interpretation or projection is voluntarily reduced so that the viewer can focus their attention on the details, the clues, and the beginnings of a story rendered impossible.
MIRROR GAMES
Alfan is currently working on a new series of paintings that works by diptychs. If the paintings are sepparated into two different spaces, they nevertheless interact by their treatment and their subject, being concieved in the manner of a deforming mirror, since the same scene is considered according to a different point of view, an addition, a displacement. One painting shows a man in profile, while the other shows him from the front. On a brick wall appears a word written in blue spray paint, “Run,” the other painting displays the word “Now.” The artist introduces a visual, memorial game by proposing two series where the same subject differs slightly. By a subtle interplay of movement, the artist opens a space where narration becomes possible. Her paintings are part of a reflection on the representation of the real subject and the omlooker. Alfan parsimoniously distils an atmosphere nourished by a disturbing dtrangeness. The works are permeated by a troubling silence, a muted violence: a gloved hand of a surgeon, bruises, the broken lens of a pair of glasses, a fire, a body immersed in a bathtub, a long scar around an ear. Added to this is the recurrence of knives, masks, shadows, missing faces and split bodies. Thus Alftan manipulates and disturbs the meaning of the images she gives us to see. With simple, effective style she questions our relationship to the images she gives us to see. With a simple, effective style she quesyions our relationship to the construction of the image by scrambling registers, references, clues of space and time.
