Cris Brodahl

Painted with the romanticised aura of yesteryear, Cris Brodahl’s Still Alive is an exquisite and bizarre arrangement. Drawing from Surrealism as a departure point for negotiating the human form, Brodahl’s painting is pieced together as a stylised motif, an irrational and dream-like icon. Brodahl’s ‘portrait’ is both seductive and monstrous: fashionable accoutrements of flowers and fur double as sensuous physicality, replicating folds of skin and alluring warmth, accessorised by a disembodied hand and all-seeing eye. Through her delicate assemblage, Brodahl composes a disjointed fetishism, conceiving the rules of attraction as esophoric and cerebral paradigm. Using painting as a tool for plausible invention, Cris Brodahl’s work examines the construction of illusion. In Wax Alter, she portrays a porcelain Madonna sculpture, using the subtle devices of representation to quietly subvert the image. Rendered in greyscale, Brodahl adopts the language of photography to enforce expected modes of seeing: the blurred horizon line in the distance creates believable perspective, and the object’s reflection enforces solidity of ground. Describing the figure itself, however, Brodahl dulls the contrast, inviting confusion between flat and three-dimensional space. ‘Collaging’ in the half-face of a fashion model and an ostentatious hairstyle, Brodahl accentuates uneasy relations between reality, representation, and artifice, centred around the female form. Working from collaged sources, Cris Brodahl condenses disparate images into unsettlingly introspective paintings, rendered with photorealistic naturalness. Executed in sepia tones, Brodahl’s The Jean Genie alludes to a cinematic glamour that’s both nostalgic and remote. Strangely buckled and conjoined, Brodahl’s figures converge as an elevated moment of high drama, creating emotional tension through their physical distortion. Through her amalgamated forms, Brodahl envisions an image of fractured beauty; its placid fabrication belying psychological unease.