Eva Nielsen’s paintings are at once cinematic, architectural and geological: fragments of built environment, desolate landscapes and utopian architecture are interwoven in her compositions through superimposed layers of opacity and transparency. Multiple scales and perspectives coexist, negate and displace one another in the dynamic indeterminacy of vanishing lines and fragmented projections, focusing the eye and the mind of the viewer simultaneously on the material density of the painting itself and on the affective matter of contemporary experience.
The artist has consistently focused her gaze on the interstitial zones of suburbia as liminal non-places, remnants of once utopian projections: landscapes in motion seen through obstructed windows and grids, empty playgrounds, fragments of infrastructure, abandoned wooden sheds and secondary homes. Combining screen-printing techniques with oil, acrylic and ink on canvas, Nielsen’s process is one of consecutive fragmentations, concealments and revelations, positioning the final work as both reserve and residue in search for a pictorial fiction capable of holding multiple narratives and temporalities. Rendered through a superimposition of photographic capture, genre painting and techniques of assemblage, these subliminal landscapes offer a kaleidoscopic view over the modernist project in all of its contradictions and achieve a semblance of arrested motion. An alternative history of land use and built environment emerges, touches our most intimate memories and borders on the sublime.
Her carefully crafted fracturing and rearticulation of the silk-screened image in disjointed assemblages is set in tension with painted substrates, both revealing the screen within the image frame, and introducing a temporal dimension wherein the image reaches our eyes and minds like a time lapse video. In her most recent work, Nielsen completes the canvas by stretching a final layer of print on silk fabric, echoing the silk screen technique at the ground layer and augmenting the textility of painting. She introduces peripheral memories, human figures and bodily postures into her vision of the periphery. Creases and folds left by the crumpled fabric that run through the paint appear like an additional substrate of vanishing lines distancing and re-arranging the image. The passage of time, through wear and tear, is at work here once again. Through all these substrates and microgestures, Eva Nielsen’s work culminates in a form of painting that exceeds its own medium, remains receptive to the viewers’ gaze and overflows into the imagination, as a metaphor for a topography of memory caught between fiction and materially inscribed traces. ...
T H E P I L L was founded in 2016 by Suela J. Cennet in the historic peninsula of Istanbul, to operate as a global platform and mobile vessel for contemporary art, supporting artists through a dynamic of cosmopolitanism beyond the dialectics of center and periphery. Initially envisioned by its founder as a space for an aesthetic of friendship, the gallery's programming is strongly inspired by the history and ideas of utopia and dystopia in modernism, with a particular focus on displacement, diaspora, feminisms, and queer aesthetics as reflected in contemporary artistic practices. ...
