Anjesa Dellova

The faces that are painted on the canvas are «rubbed» with brushes, a technique that may seem «aggressive» at first but in the finish appears paradoxically soft. I am always looking for a certain poverty characterized by this technique. With this monochrome, I am indeed trying to flatten the form and the subject, because I am not looking for the sumptuousness of the material and no seduction in itself. The volume almost disappears and things float.

The characters I paint have a deformed face and body, and these two even seem disconnected, as if they don’t belong to each other anymore. This distortion is related to the way I see them, althoughI don’t want it to appear as an exaggeration or a caricature. I try to disturb the viewer through this animosity that would emanate from the characters to such an extent that it could lead him into discomfort and disorientation, but in a way that mainly makes him realize that nothing is smooth and everything is mysterious in the face-to-face encounter with the work and others.

I don’t want some of the details of the painting to be interpreted as mere illustrations when I use some of the codes of comics in some of the deformations. I don’t want to approach the face by «exaggerating» it, rather I try to explore the way it emerges : the face that cannot be reduced to its plastic form, nor to the eyes, the nose or the mouth. This naked, vulnerable, poor face. The appearance of others that always escapes me and that I can never fully grasp. Thus the face is no longer limited by its features, it refuses to be contained (Emmanuel Levinas). And in this face to face encounter, there is always something disturbing.