Corduroy

Henni Alftan’s witty and beguiling compositions concentrate our attention on specific details: a triangle of light reaching across the living room; rectangles of glowing windows in the city skyline; the repeated lines of corduroy trousers. Through sharp cropping and nuances of texture, she invites viewers not only to look closely but to feel what is being pictured. In ‘Corduroy’, the fuzzy fabric and its distortion as it stretches around a body, is made palpable through paint.

By the standards of traditional formal portraiture, ‘Corduroy’ is a painting of a fragment. Think, by contrast, of the fine lace sleeves of the opulent gowns in portraits by Sargent or the sensuous folds of the cape in Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. Alftan chooses to paint the fabric and leave out almost everything else, omitting the additional information that would let us orient ourselves in relation to this sitter, their gender, and their demeanour. The result is at once a study in painted line and a deferred portrait, which makes us wonder who we are seeing while also proposing that partial knowledge, framed and contained in a painting, can itself be perfectly satisfying.