A French window opens to a veranda viewing the garden. At one end stands a large printer, so massive that its presence is slightly alien in the space and at the other end, usually, a painting in progress.

Visiting Eva Nielsenʼs studio didnʼt reveal the images. It became about noticing what lay before me: the materials and the space holding the daily rituals shaping the timeline of the work. Elements of her paintings are taken from the surrounding scenery, from her backyard to the paradigmatic contrasted landscape of Paris suburbs where she lives. Seen from the train, it appears like a moving image of an amalgam of concrete, nature and void. Some of her works are taken to the garden and left there to the elements for a while.

From the window, watching the day passing in the studio, the rain and after the sun and the wind. The matters are passing through it, then the surface is scraped and the dirt blown away.

Despite the figurative, what you are looking at is not obvious. One has to spend the time to properly grasp what is given on the canvas, in order to tune with its layered temporality. The first insight is to understand it as a landscape as each painting generates an impression of depth with a skyline. This delineation stands from the contrast in the difference of tones between the higher and lower part of the painting. Memory function understands this image as a seminal sign for landscape. After this preliminary imprint, the eyes still wonders in the canvas trying to shape objects. As they try to maintain coherence in the projection of depth, they are disturbed by interferences and soon start to perceive the failures in the mirage electrically wired by the brain. There are many layers.

In the foreground on the left there is a clearer zone where the matter is thicker and the concentrated black reflects the light; on the other edge, a haptic zone of black transparency like a “night dark beyond darkness”. The black spots amass in patches shaping forms or obstructing the coloured sections underneath. That something will shape up from beneath is still unknown. Some waves are forming in the upper part but I donʼt know if itʼs the skyline or some pattern of a grid. Maybe I need to put on my glasses. The view seems clearer but the luminous zone has changed, itʼs now on the right. Itʼs an inviting path towards a green field with rocky hill behind but the other end is still completely dark. Curves are forming in the mid ground round an inky pupil.

Something happens in this confusion of layers. Eva likes to paint screens or print on the canvas pictures of view through screens. A picture of a landscape through a tarp is like an already made painting: a tarp is a canvas, made out of warp and woofs strings; a landscape will appear through it with a blurred brushstroke.

In Evaʼs paintings the tarps in front of the landscape are sometimes gridded like pixelated images. The grid is an average pattern one encounters on every screen. It is a persistent sign in our eyes that our brain has to adjust in order to fit to what we understand as reality.

HP5500 UV – Blue Eyes & Electric Bills

The printer is an ally in the research for the potentiality of failures and brings to the painting elements of chance. Like the brain it adjusts the signal to its understanding and capacities. Therefore it sometimes has a personal understanding of the shades of colours given by the digital image file. Also as it is designed primarily for paper, the printing is not homogeneous; the use of a canvas prepared with gesso, plus the ink and paint on it, generates defects. Eva also plays with dither and halftone by printing over the canvas several times. The computer-calculated density and order of the dots are disturbed generating unexpected moiré effects.

Eva has another occupation, more confidential and secluded in the process of her work. The activity taking most of her time is the editing of the images to be printed on the canvas or the paper. This step of shaping an image is always made in relation with the medium and the work in progress. When it is due to lay over painting or ink, the editing will play with the imagination of a composition from the screen of the computer to the larger scale of the canvas. When itʼs the opposite way, it will then generate a preliminary composition to work on with the materials. Sometimes there are several printings superimposing, with different layers of materials generating shadows and spectral shapes. The mix between the printerʼs ink and the other materials in relation with humidity plays a role in the variations of transparency, texture and absorption of light on the canvas.

Screen Alias Window Alias Canvas

The common denominator of her image bank is her interest in transitional spaces, habited or inhabited buildings and lands, waste grounds or construction sites in the middle of nature. Most of her work shape ambiguous vacant sceneries but at the end of the road, there is a picture of a blurred memory of a boat trip in Denmark with an unexpected anthropomorphic figure.

Taken as a fundamental condition of seeing the luring apparatus of vision, Eva Nielsenʼs generates trompe-lʼoeil representations grounded in the everyday experience of image production: the digital condition of the image is her permanent shift between the invisible and the optical illusion. Taking up the in-between spaces generated by the flaws of our vision allows realities where our senses are blurred beyond the comfort zone of our perception.

Text by Barbara Sirieix

Eva Nielsen is a French-Danish figurative and abstract artist born in 1983. Nielsenʼs body of work is been acquired by Mac/Val Museé dʼArt Contemporain, France, Fonds Municipal dʼArt Contemporain, France, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, France and by the Collection dʼart Contemporain de la Société Générale, France. Her recent solo shows were exhibited at different locations in Switzerland, France and Norway. And her recent group shows include locations such as France, Slovakia, Russia, Spain, USA and Portugal. Her most significant residences include La Pratique, France, LKV, Norway, PLOT, France, École Supérieure d’Art et Design, France and the École des Beaux-arts de Toulouse. For more detailed information or work available please do not hesitate to contact us or visit our website.