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The “One Sweet Moment  ” exhibition at the Claire Gastaud gallery in Clermont-Ferrand brings together some twenty new paintings by Henni Alftan. Figurative works that return a fragmented vision of the real, to better question the representation of the visible world.

Henni Alftan, Untitled, 2016. Painting, oil on canvas, 55 × 46 cm

Henni Alftan’s paintings question our vision of reality

Henni Alftan’s paintings are marked by the rejection of any narrative dimension or temporal logic. They structure an imaginary that is defined by fragmentation by offering images that never represent a subject in its totality. By working on the frame and the framing of the painted elements, Henni Alftan breaks up the image, the objects, the bodies and the story, isolating here a gesture (Reminder), a look (Voyeur), a hand, a silhouette, a shadow, a color, a piece of clothing … His approach encourages us to question the image through the painting object and to reflect on what we see, the visible world and its modes of representation.

Henni Alftan’s pictorial approach mixes the history of painting and photography

Although figurative, Henni Alftan’s painting is not intended to imitate the real perfectly and is therefore not part of a pictorial illusionist approach. It raises questions that mix the history of painting and that of photography. Indeed, it addresses pictorial issues such as color, surface, flat, depth, pattern, look, line, composition, framing, mirror or story but it also feeds on questions such as decontextualization, the physical dimension of the image, the taking of motifs or anonymity, themes that link his work to that of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans.