Henni Alftan is a Finnish painter, working with figuration, but rejecting a narrative dimension. Her compositions use the tight framing of close-range photography to explore the similarities between painting and image-making. Entitled Night-time, her show at Sprüth Magers features ten artworks dealing with the subject of night, that suspended moment in time.
THE LIGHT OBSERVER : Maybe we can start by speaking about your rigorous approach to painting. It borrows from photography – in its framing and in its documentary-like approach – yet you don’t use photography in your process and your paintings represent reality in a quite different way. How would you describe your relationship with photography, and how do you see painting as a medium (specificities, qualities)?
HENNI ALFTAN : I wouldn’t really call it a documentary-like approach since the scenes I depict are more like a construction of elements than a truthful rendering of a specific event. They’re perceptions and thoughts on painting and image-making, all interwoven. Like you said, I don’t use photography but I do use framings or even the blurry effects that are likened to photography. It’s just that photography is really an important part of contemporary iconography. In classical painting you have three ways of opening visual space in a picture: one is a window, another is a picture within a picture, like a painting in a painting. The third is a reflection, like depicting a mirror for example. But I think cinema – and therefore photography too – has given us a fourth one that is the hors-champ, the offscreen. Arguably this already existed in painting but I don’t think it was really present in our way of reading pictures, the way the cinema has taught us. And I love this because it’s the one that really activates the mind of the viewer; makes the viewer look instead of just passively seeing.
How would you describe the way you paint?
Intentional, straightforward or matter-of-fact I guess? I try to find the simplest way of rendering my picture in paint, of applying the paint on canvas. I’m hoping that the paint would also be present as paint and not as an illusionistic effect. I guess that’s also why I don’t strive for perfection (so as to not give it that industrial feel; it would make it a different kind of object in my mind). I like that you can see a certain level of careful application but being very much flawed in the detail. So that it would preserve some of that ‘I was here’ that is so special with paintings.
Your drawings are executed in a very precise way. How important are contour lines in your painting, in your process?
A well thought contour allows me summarise a lot of information and paint in a very simple manner. I think Japanese ukiyo-e prints are great examples of this. There is no modelling in them at all. All the volumes are expressed in the contours.
One can see your paintings as objects too, painted objects. Is it something you have in mind when working on new artwork? What does that imply?
Very much so. From the very beginning when I start planning a sketch for a painting I’m acutely aware that I’m not starting with nothing; I already have this rectangular shape and the rest will happen in relation to that. Sometimes the rectangle is replayed in the composition. My compositions are very tight because they are to be perceived with a lot of space around them on the wall. Because like you said, they are also painted objects. And scale of course I think is another factor in regards to the paintings’ objecthood and the human scale of the viewer. Things are only large or small in proportion to ourselves. I also always paint the sides of the canvas. I never consider my paintings as simply picture planes. Their objecthood is important to me for two reasons; the first is the presence that they have. The other is their almost exemplary quality as an art object. If in a comic book there is a representation of an art object it is likely going to be a medium sized oil on canvas. It’s the archetype.
What attracts you to figurative art?
I’ve always been interested in the relationship that an image has to the medium or material that it’s rendered in. But mostly it’s because images work on us, on our psyche and our perception of the world. Just like psychoanalysis teaches that words work us, so do pictures. I do like the fact that figurative painting is easily approachable for different publics. I can talk about life simultaneously with art history and art making without compromising either.
Can you give me some examples of things you understood, learned, or discovered through other painters?
Ingres gives blurry outlines to skin to give you a sensation of softness, for example. Pierre Soulages is an abstract painter but he draws with the relief and the shine of the paint. I have a fondness for Van Gogh’s directional brushstrokes too, but I use them a little differently.
I was wondering what the subjects of your first paintings were. Have you always been interested in representing objects or detailed scenes, close-ups?
My first paintings as a young artist represented objects that had a distinct resemblance to a brushstroke and were then executed with very large manneristic brushstrokes. They were things like planks of wood or a head of hair seen from behind. They weren’t scenes, just objects represented in their entirety, on a blank coloured surface. They were really more like something from an ABC-book.
How do you deal with the scale of a scene? When does it feel right?
Well there’s of course the presence of the object to be considered, like we talked about before. But I think scale is also historical. In classical painting I would rarely see anything represented larger than lifesize. So I admit that to me anything smaller than 1:1 feels pretty classical and I purposely try to avoid it. On the other hand a very enlargened, big canvas has that pop-art feel to it, particularly as my pictures are very simple, so I don’t really want to go there either because it would give the wrong impression to as what the work is about.
One can also see your paintings as memories of reality more than a depiction of a scene you witness. How do you introduce this intimacy in your paintings? Paintings that at first glance could seem clean and impersonal.
Very much so. I’d even say that they are more about how we see the world or how it seems to us, rather than how it really is. It’s about looking and seeing rather than the reality itself. I think the intimacy comes from the imperfect way they are painted and the fact that the drawing is done from memory and not from a model. The pictures aren’t realistic but they are credible suggestions as to what things kind of look like. They’re not surreal. Although the scenes or pictures are largely something that we’ve probably already seen, I think the fact that they are reimagined by me and my drawing makes them singular.
The subjects you paint are somehow reduced to an essence. You simplify an image a lot, and one gets the impression that it is there to name and show the thing at the same time. Can you expand on that idea?
I guess my paintings look like how I would describe things, rather than how they are. Unlike with photography, I can draw a tree ‘in general’. A tree that doesn’t really resemble any specific tree but corresponds to the idea of a tree. Kind of like with words.
You’ve done a show entitled Night-time, at Sprüth Magers, Berlin. What is your relationship with the night? How did it become the subject of your exhibition?
The idea of night really came from the space that is a street level gallery that is entirely visible from the street. In short, the show was going to be visible both at night and day. I was more intrigued by the nocturnal vision of the paintings in the dark city. It was in October so days were short.
Somehow, at night, reality becomes a blur, strange. We can find a sort of disturbing strangeness in your paintings. Do you find inspiration at night?
I don’t know that I would call light a narrative tool in The Night Journey, but it does play a significant part in the experience. From the way in which the light blooms through the reflection sequences, to the final walk into the candlelight, the player is guided by light and in some cases the absence of light throughout the piece. Light and darkness are used metaphorically, and each player’s journey through these elements forms a unique experience.
