Henni Alftan

The work of Henni Alftan (*1979) stems from a deep engagement with the medium of painting, its methods and its histories, resulting in pictures of daily life that are intimately familiar and yet intriguingly unknowable. Born in Helsinki and based in Paris, the artist depicts everyday scenes and objects, often cropped or otherwise fragmented, each rendered with a studied economy of means. In spite of her pared-down aesthetic, Alftan’s experiments with color, texture, scale and perspective produce canvases rich in layered meanings that double as metaphors for seeing and comprehending the world through the physical properties of paint. An array of forms populate Alftan’s visual world—a fruit being sliced, the shape of an open umbrella, pieces of jewelry and the wrist or neck they rest upon—offering snippets of private life that, while specific, seem part of an image bank of collective memory. The artist’s deliberate croppings both focus on the view at hand and hint at what lies beyond the canvas’ edges, in a manner that recalls cinematic space and the cuts of film. Yet any suggestion of narrative remains ambiguous and open-ended, with every work infused with a cool tension and suspension. The artist approaches each of her figurative paintings beginning with an initial concept sparked by personal memories or observations, which Alftan first translates onto paper via sketches and notations. Her methodical, premeditated process, divorced from more common studio practices of life drawing or working from photographs, contributes to the hyperreal nature of her canvases. Alftan’s unique palette mixed from primary colors, as well as the diverse set of painterly gestures she utilizes—flat areas of color, smudged and blurred passages, strokes of thick impasto, sometimes all within one picture—likewise define her works’ unusual look and feel.