The work Conversation Piece is a series of large-scale watercolours of close-up faces painted in a cinematic format. Appearing fragile and grotesque at the same time with intense eyes the ambivalence is enhanced. It is an exploration of the intimate and intrusive, the psychologically-charged skin and the power of the gaze. The exhibition is strongly influenced by the medium of film and its ability to completely occupy the mind of the spectator. I mainly work with watercolours in larger format and animation. Thematically, the works often revolves around the body, skin and the gaze, and how this can be represented by the specific conditions of painting.
Based on the idea that the close-up in film minimizes the distance between spectator and fiction, the close-up in Conversation Piece is used as a way to simulate intimacy. The spectator is physically closer than in an otherwise unachievable position. The installation of the four paintings makes it possible to extend out into the room and create a new scene. It becomes a staging of gazes, meetings and dialogues. The viewer gets into the middle of this scene and helps to activate the work. The cinematic movement has been removed by using still images and is instead replaced by the spectators movement in the room. It is a drama without a narrative, but where the content interacts with the experience; the intimate, bare and exposed in the images is to be found in the room between viewer and work.
Using film media as framework is a way to use collective references and memories that films create. The aesthetics in film media in popular culture shapes our memory, memories that are both private and public, that we easily can relate our emotional experiences to.
Parallel to the interest in the experience of film and the relationship to film as a media, there is also a painterly exploration going on and how it can be connected to the content of the work. It is an exploration of what happens within the surface. The surface of the image (the painting) and the surface of the body (the skin) intertwine. The intense colour in the paintings create an illusion; dots and colours are mixed up with facial imperfections, not knowing where the two of them differ.
