Henni Alftan at Studiolo

Artist: Henni Alftan

Venue: Studiolo, Milan, Italy

Date: February 22 – March 25, 2019

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Studiolo, Milan

Studiolo is delighted to inaugurate the solo show of artist Henni Alftan (Helsinki, 1979); for her first solo exhibition in Italy, she will be presenting a series of seven pictorial works, ranging in size from small to medium, specifically selected for this gallery. Like Bertrand Morane, the protagonist in François Truffaut’s film The Man Who Loved Women – a character who falls in love if attracted by a single detail of a woman – Alftan transforms the peculiarities gathered within reality into the foundational elements she uses to construct her delicate pictorial imaginary. From them she crafts a “storyboard” in continuous evolution, developing from canvas to canvas: an intimate vision of the everyday composed through the blending of the artist’s memory, imagination and experience.

Employing a hand-drawn graphic style, created through the use of flat brushstrokes and dense colors, Alftan constructs an inventory of small particularities, depicting on the canvas that moment in which her gaze forms a connection with that of the observer, inevitably also stimulating their mnemonic alphabet. Her use of the everyday glows under an opaque light that, unravelling, projects clear shadows, describing a reality very similar to the close-up of a dream or an elaborate fiction liberated from her mind.

In the artist’s studio there are no photographic images from which to take inspiration: everything is born from abstract mental annotations that each day Alftan attempts to reproduce in the most synthetic and evocative way possible; hands busy defining an action, objects or human profiles from which, solely through the manipulation of color, emerge some “elect” characteristics like glasses or drops of sweat. The proportions articulate themselves on the perimeter of the canvas, forming only that which is necessary and determining a pictorial language that strives not only for representation but for the celebration of another world.

As Duchamp used to repeat,, the physical and poetic quality of the painting is to fix the apparition of an appearance.