Artist’s Statement

Jennifer Presant
60 East 8th St. Apt. 17G  New York, NY 10003  tel  917-446-6030 
Email: jenpresant@earthlink.net      Website: jenniferpresant.com
Born:  1971, New York, NY


My paintings allow the viewer to explore and interpret multi-layered, dreamlike images that are highly evocative, saturated in color and dramatically illuminated. The scale, staging of the figures and multiple layers of reality simulate the cinematic experience. Each painting becomes a psychological landscape or waking dream, reinforcing the ambiguous relationship between time, memory and place. At times the figure is present, and at other times the melancholic absence is implied. Conscious and unconscious desire, memory, and projection unfold pictorially. Through the merging of both real and fictitious elements, I investigate the conflation between our media filled lives, and our lived reality: we live among images and in some sense as images. Our memories of events are distorted. With media today, we have grown accustomed to watching ourselves and living from a voyeuristic standpoint. It’s like we are looking back at ourselves with an uncanny objectivity.

I mimic the process of reconstructing memory in the development of the composition for the painting. After an initial sketch, objects and figures, part real, part imaginary are digitally combined to feel fragmented and pieced together. Projections are sometimes employed in the set-up, either on a figure or on the walls. Flat graphic shapes combine with highly illusionistic form. Virtual spaces are digitally created to reinforce the feeling of artificiality and detachment. These compositions also refer to other art forms, such as video art, installation and photography, raising the question of how realism fits within contemporary art. Once a composition is finalized using digital technology, I meticulously paint the image in oil, adding a new level of coherence and reinterpretation achieved through the hand-made process. The human form of both subject and viewer defines how each perceives and experiences reality