Elina Brotherus, Paris, April 2001:
“Photography is the new painting”, said my friend Edda Jonsdottir, director of i8 gallery in Reykjavik. With this somewhat provocative sentence in mind in June 2000 I started my still ongoing series, “The New Painting.” I use contemporary means of expression (large format color photography), but I owe a lot to the aesthetics of classical figurative painting. With the camera I try to approach the same problems that painters have been dealing with for centuries: light, color, composition, figures in space, projection of the three-dimensional into the two-dimensional. I find these questions fundamental in all visual arts.
The subject matters come from my close surroundings - from where I live, where I travel, with whom I share my time. The images fall into two categories: landscapes, notably the Horizon works (called Horizons, Low Horizons, and Very Low Horizons, depending on the division of the picture plane), and works with the human figure.
Like in my earlier work, I frequently use myself as a model. However, these new works escape from the inherent problem of self-portraiture, the problem of «representing oneself». They do not aim at drawing a psychological portrait of the subject, but rather presenting him/her as an object of investigation, not for the inner properties but for the external ones. The person in the picture is a model, in the same sense as painters have been using models. The human figure offers endless possibilities. How do the figures interact with space and with each other? How does the light reveal the form? What happens if the direction of the gaze changes? The human body in its beauty and its banality never stops to fascinate me.
It is important to me to combine these two categories of work. I like formal simplicity; the landscapes constructed of only a few lines function as resting places for the spectator. The works in The New Painting search for beauty and are motivated by it, even if “beauty” might be considered controversial in contemporary art.
