Judith Eisler has been painting film stills for over two and a half decades. While such a process places her in the discourse of appropriation, when an artist engages with a single subject for such a long duration, the initial idea, in her case of painting appropriate images of films, mainly of women ceases to be an adequate explanation of the artist’s practice. Something much harder to define is happening. Think of Morandi. It would be absurd to say that his “idea” was to paint bottles. Likewise, it appears that for Eisler, painting film stills has not been the central concern for some time. On the contrary, the quality of these photographic images seems to offer him a level of familiarity, a sense of rootedness in the subject, which allows him to explore the creation of images in subtle variations and in various pictorial registers.
For example, there is a nice little graphite drawing on paper, titled Sean, 2008, in his current exhibition at the Charim Galerie. It shows the profile of a young woman. The fuzzy texture is reminiscent of Seurat’s drawings, while the figure’s expression and composition evoke Munch’s recurring images of a sick child, especially the lithographs which show only the child’s head. Far from the coldness associated with appropriationist images, the drawing is in sincere dialogue with the atmospheric and emotionally charged figuration of early modernism.
Meanwhile, abstraction makes its presence evident in works such as Sean 32022, where the moire pattern of a screen photograph appears in the painting as a veil over the realistic portrait of a woman, enhancing the material quality of the image as a painted canvas. Cinema lights 6, 2016-2023, is a near-monochrome that erases all traces of illusion and leaves only the delicately modulating surface. In these works, photography begins to disappear through intense distillation, and the reality of painting as a physical and material presence begins to dominate.
