Ellen Altfest, 'Paintings', 2007, selection.
Small, portable painting is the order of the day at White Cube hq. Martin Kobe's stunning, colour-rich canvases get the big room, but Ellen Altfest's more traditional-seeming compositions, hanging humbly in the project space upstairs at White Cube, steal the show with their meticulous care for purposefully dull subject matter.
Following up on the work she showed in 2005, oil on canvas paintings featuring natural objects such as tumbleweeds and found driftwood, the new series sees Altfest deepening her fascination with the surface of things, this time of subjects that are less obliquely concrete, less embedded in a process of erosion and abstraction: life studies of male nude models and still lives of autumnal gourds and broken metal pipes, traditional genres approached in an entirely contemporary, self-aware manner.
The works, displayed in an order that alternates between the subjects, have a strange sexual charge, frankness veiled in a knowing, almost humorous cover of study-like naivete. The male nudes are shown with eyes closed, underscoring a kind of complicit voyeurism between artist, viewer and even model. The pumpkins and metal junk thicken the aura and atmosphere of the artists' studio running through the lot - Altfest's clever fictionalisation and ever-present questioning of its very real yet constantly stage-like, imaginary spatial and relation construction.
The artist's laborious, openly time-consuming, directly from life imaging method pamper the eyes of those who look at the finished pieces, layer upon layer of detail, irregularity and perspective ending in an image that at first seems entirely fragmented but within seconds is as palpably life-like as the original which it mimics. Staring at her painting of a sitter's hairy butt, each single strand and mark on its skin recorded and made eternal, Durer comes to mind, as does Chuck Close.
There is a similar air of distinguished honouring going on, the sort of subversive pictorial elevation of the ordinary that was common in Netherlandish painting too, bringing to mind the meaning of endless school essays and practices, of the meaning of repetition in genre. In their almost frenetically atomic representation, they are also incredibly eye-draining; David Humphrey has written that 'the dense skin of [Altfest's] paintings invites us to travel into nether-spaces of bewildering complexity where we become lost in a thoroughly mapped world right in front of our eyes'. Nothing is what it seemed to be at first; I'd love to know how each canvas begins.
Ellen Altfest received an MFA from Yale University. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2002) and was awarded a studio at the Marie Walsh Sharpe art Foundation 2004-5. In 2004 she attended the Dorland Mountain Art Center in the foothills of Temecula, CA. She was included in 'USA today' at the RA last year, and in 'Men', a group exhibition she curated at I-20 in New York. An essay. A fully illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Barry Schwabsky, accompanies the exhibition.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
ELLEN ALTFEST, 'PAINTINGS'
To 24 Nov 2007.
Inside the White Cube
48 Hoxton Square
London N1 6PB
T: +44 (0)20 7930 5373
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