Ellen Altfest

Ellen Altfest is known for her painstakingly slow approach to bringing her paintings to fruition—a depiction of a dead tree once took her thirteen months of daily work in the woods of Connecticut. Given this time frame, the twenty-two paintings in this solo exhibition spanning seventeen years—with subjects ranging from trees, gourds, views out a window, and mostly naked man parts—comes close to being a survey of the American artist’s endeavor.

No matter how small her works—the size of Alfest’s paintings seems to be diminishing—they still advance a sense of claustrophobic largeness. Armpit, 2011, is a portrait, close-up, of a hairy underarm—all creamy pink with faint green veins—against a corduroy-like fabric. Composition, 2015, offers three surfaces in a grid-like array: a tartan blanket, a glimpse of skin (perhaps a torso), and another woven material. With its rectilinear divisions, it suggests modernist painting and hints at Altfest’s agenda as a painter. These latest works exude a Morandiesque calm, while her earlier ones, of mostly trees, possess a Pollock-like all-overness.

Yet there is also sense of cruelty about this show. These works are harsh in the sense that no surface feels unscanned, uncontemplated, untouched, of the subject and of the canvas itself. It is as if both have been raked over with eyes. But this is what Altfest asks of her viewers, to look and see, then go and see more closely. Ultimately, hers is an exercise in stillness, both through vision and contemplation.