Christine Gjoerup
Aprés la douche, 2021
I like to think of painting as sort of alchemy. I am fascinated by the possibilities of paint as a medium in a spiritual and intellectual sense--how it is able to express ideas, feelings, thoughts, and experiences from one human to another, through its own anatomy of colour and texture.
My abstracted paintings seek to evoke a reaction of desire, born of ambiguity and curiosity. I am interested in exploring the multifaceted ways in which imprints, as an impression left by a now absent entity, determine our visual construction of a surface, between the implied space--literal physical space as well as social space--that our bodies occupy, and the contours, the marks those bodies leave behind. At times I activate this visual conversation in a diagrammatic manner by situating flat, exaggerated silhouettes amid an environment of volumetric grounds. Other times I engage with it on a more theoretical level, trying to make sense of how nonrepresentational forms interact with one another and realize an equillibrium across shared boundaries. Either way, I indulge my penchant for suspending the painting between a series of polarities: bodies vs. non-bodies; figure vs. ground; surface vs. volume; presence vs. absence.
