Longlati展讯 | Henni Alftan 亨尼·阿尔夫坦：镜厅

文摘文化 2024-10-29 18:35 上海

Henni Alftan

House of Mirrors

亨尼·阿尔夫坦

镜厅

Curator: Wenjie Sun

策展人：孙文杰

2024年11月8日 — 2025年1月18日

亨尼·阿尔夫坦在Longlati经纬艺术中心最新个展“镜厅”邀请观众进入一个图像与表征之间界限模糊的世界。本次展览由孙文杰策划，展览收录了艺术家新近创作的十七件布面油画，这也是迄今为止阿尔夫坦最大规模的亚洲个展。

阿尔夫坦的作品伫立于观察与想象的交界处，身体在她的笔下成为能指，手势化为象征，观众与作品则能协作出超过目之所见的内容。她的实践类似“活人画”（tableau vivant）——一种通过表演者在固定位置、姿势和造型中保持纹丝不动的艺术形式，阿尔夫坦的作品捕捉到那些静止的手势、姿态和场景，令平静和张力交替呈现。

艺术家受安装手册中简洁明了的图示启发，常以手势为绘画主题。手部动作在人与人之间的交流中既具功能性，又极富表现力。在阿尔夫坦的作品里，手部的动作被剥离了个性，化为纯粹的形式，也可被视作强有力的符号，不需要透露语境便能传达出丰富的含义。这与弗迪南·德·索绪尔的符号学理论不谋而合：手势作为“能指”（符号的物质形式），它所唤起的情感与解释则为“所指”（符号所代表的内容）。

除了手之外，艺术家亦会不断回访星空、窗户、霓虹标志、杯子、唇部，阶梯等主题。自画像《马尾辫》（2024）则是对她早期作品的再创作，阿尔夫坦巧借了发型和油画笔之间近似的形态，通过放大前作的某个细节，创造了一幅新的、亲密的反思之作。艺术家不仅仅是在复制外界事物，而是通过绘画来捕捉世界的表象及其背后的复杂性。在她看来，绘画与图像常常互相模仿。艺术家声称：“我的图像并不新颖。我没有真的发明它们。它们好像早就已经存在了。”阿尔夫坦只是以精准的力度将图像捕获下来，绘画是她对“可见世界及其表现形式”的一种回应。

Henni Alftan, Ponytail, 2024, oil on linen, 65 x 81 cm. Courtesy the artist and KARMA 亨尼·阿尔夫坦，《马尾辫》，2024年，亚麻布面油彩，65 x 81厘米。图片致谢艺术家和KARMA

艺术家在三联作品《一次对话（两者之间）》（2024）中延续使用了图像之间的留白技巧——她在多件双联屏的前作中已经开始采用这种技法。构图中两位人物的形象是不完整的——二人皆被隐去了面部，手部姿势取而代之，这些手势也在强化“对话”这一主题。为了加深对画中描绘事物的理解，观者须要从脑海中重新排列组合，方能形成一个完整的场景。

“镜厅”是一种被多面镜子环绕的空间设置，这样的空间使人联想起游乐园中的欢乐屋，在里面现实场景总以扭曲的面貌被映照。艺术家将这个空间结构从狂欢的语境中提取出来，她邀请观众参与到场景的激活与生成中。“镜厅”也近似于安德烈·纪德的 “镜渊”（mise en abyme）手法，“镜渊”就是关于文本互涉性的文学理论，它强调了元媒介与能指的关系。通过这种结构，创作者本人、作品世界与读者世界全都无缝套在了一起。在视觉效果上，“镜厅”也指涉1973年功夫电影《龙争虎斗》中的著名场景“镜子迷宫”，其中对仗人物连续地流动在镜面空间里，哪怕独自一人，镜中影像也犹如探戈共舞。

随着光线从苏河畔的窗户注入展厅，“镜厅”与这座城市发生了联动——还未步入展厅观众就与分叉的入口相遇，他们由此开启各自的选择。静待着访客的是夜色中的海滩，泛着红色城市灯光的窗户，窗外闪耀的星空……阿尔夫坦为上海带来了一系列与夜晚相关的图像，它们与艺术家在纽约Karma画廊同期展览中的白日作品互文。两场展览作为一组镜像，彼此照映于地球的两端。

Henni Alftan, The Bay (Night), 2024, oil on linen, 150 x 300 cm. Courtesy the artist and KARMA 亨尼·阿尔夫坦，《海湾（夜景）》，2024年，亚麻布面油彩，150 x 300厘米。图片致谢艺术家和KARMA

Henni Alftan’s solo exhibition at Longlati Foundation, “House of Mirrors,” invites the viewer to a world where the boundaries between image and representation blur. Curated by Sun Wenjie, the exhibition comprises seventeen mostly recent works on canvas, her largest solo exhibition in Asia to date.

Alftan’s works stand at the intersection of observation and imagination, where the body becomes a signifier, the gesture acts as a symbol, and the spectator and the artwork collaborate to engender more than what meets the eye. Like a tableau vivant—an art form in which the performer remains motionless in fixed positions, presenting a still scene—Alftan’s works rcapture frozen gestures, poses, and scenes, rendering them alternately tranquil and tense.

Inspired by the precise illustrations in instruction manuals, Alftan often takes hand gestures as subjects. Movements of the hands are both functional and expressive in person-to-person communication. In Alftan’s work, hand gestures are stripped of their identifying characteristics and transformed into pure forms and compelling symbols, conveying rich meanings without revealing their context. This approach coincides with Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic theory, in which the gesture serves as the “signifier” (the material form of the sign), while the emotions and interpretations it evokes are the “signified” (what the sign represents).

Henni Alftan, A Conversation (In-between), 2024, oil on linen, in three parts, 146 x 276.5 cm. Cour-tesy the artist and KARMA 亨尼·阿尔夫坦，《一次对话（两者之间）》，2024年，亚麻布面油彩，三联作，146 x 276.5厘米。图片致谢艺术家和KARMA

In addition to the hand, the artist revisits motifs such as the starry sky, windows, neon signs, cups, lips, and stairs. The self-portrait Ponytail (2024) is a re-take of an earlier work that played on the titular hairstyle’s resemblance to a paintbrush. Here, Alftan magnifies a detail of her previous painting into a new, intimate reflection. The artist is not merely reproducing objects from the physical world but is capturing the appearance of the world and the complexity behind it. In her view, the work on canvas and the image often imitates each other. As the artist has said: “My images are not new. I did not really invent them. It is as if they were already there.” Alftan simply captures them with precision, and the painted medium becomes a site onto which she responds to “the visible world and its manifestations.”

The triptych A Conversation (In-between) (2024) extends Alftan’s adoption of blank space between images, a technique she has applied in several of her previous diptychs. Two figures in the composition are incomplete; their faces are concealed, highlighting instead the hand gestures in their implied conversation. The spectator has to mentally complete the scene in order to deepen their understanding of what is depicted on the canvas.

Henni Alftan, Red Sky, 2024, oil on linen, 195 x 130 cm. Courtesy the artist and KARMA 亨尼·阿尔夫坦，《红色天空》，2024年，亚麻布面油彩，195 x 130厘米。图片致谢艺术家和KARMA

“House of Mirrors” is a spatial installation consisting of surrounding mirrors, reminiscent of an amusement park funhouse where reality is reflected through distortion. Alftan takes such a spatial structure out of its carnival context and invites the viewer to participate in activating and generating a depicted scene. “House of Mirrors” resonates with André Gide’s notion of the mise en abyme, a literary theory on intertextuality that addresses the relationship between the meta-medium and the signifier, through which the creator, the work of art, and the spectator are tied together. From a visual perspective, “House of Mirrors” also evokes the famous scene of the “mirror maze” in the 1973 martial arts movie Enter the Dragon, where opponents go in and out of the mirror-filled space. Even if there was only one person, the image in the mirror always resembles a tango.

As light pours into the exhibition hall through windows looking out on the Suzhou River, the “House of Mirrors” and the city interact. Stepping into the exhibition space and facing the forked entrances, the spectator must walk the path they choose. A beach at night, windows flooded with red city lights, and a starry sky glittering outside await them. Alftan has brought a series of nighttime scene to Shanghai that resonate with a suite of daytime works that will be on view concurrently at Karma in New York. The two exhibitions are themselves mirrored, echoing each other from across the globe.

关于艺术家

▲Henni Alftan. Courtesy the artist and KARMA 亨尼·阿尔夫坦。由艺术家和KARMA惠允

亨尼·阿尔夫坦（1979年出生于芬兰赫尔辛基）是一名现居巴黎的画家。她复杂的图像创作过程结合了观察与推理，作品根植于具象绘画，却拒绝了叙事的纬度。如同微距摄影一般，阿尔夫坦采用紧凑的取景构图，探索绘画与图像创作的共性。阿尔夫坦曾提到：“我绘制图像，而绘画与图像常常模仿彼此。”她的图像仿佛是对现实世界某种碎片化的呈现，探讨了图像创作中诸如色彩、表面、平面、深度、图案、纹理与构图手段等问题，邀请观者去思考绘画的历史、材料性与物质性。

其近期个展见于洛杉矶Karma画廊（2023）、伦敦施布特-玛格（2022）画廊、纽约Karma画廊（2020）、米兰Studiolo（2019）以及赫尔辛基TM-Galleria（2018）。亨尼·阿尔夫坦的作品被多个国际机构收藏，包括芬兰阿莫斯瑞克斯美术馆、达拉斯美术馆、芬兰埃斯波现代艺术博物馆、洛杉矶哈默博物馆、赫尔辛基美术馆、亚特兰大高等艺术博物馆、迈阿密当代艺术学院美术馆、芬兰瓦萨昆齐现代艺术博物馆，洛杉矶郡立美术馆以及瑞银艺术收藏等。

Henni Alftan (b. 1979, Helsinki, Finland) is a Paris-based painter who creates pictures based on a complex process of observation and deduction. Working in figuration but rejecting a narrative dimension, Alftan’s compositions use the tight framing of close-range photography to explore the similarities between painting and image-making. “I paint pictures,” Alftan says, and “painting and picture often imitate each other.” Inviting viewers to consider the history, materiality, and objecthood of painting, Alftan’s vignettes represent a fragmented vision of the real and address pictorial issues such as color, surface, flatness, depth, pattern, texture, and framing devices.

Recent solo exhibitions include Karma, Los Angeles (2023); Sprüth Magers, London (2022); Karma, New York (2020); Studiolo, Milan (2019); and TM-Galleria, Helsinki (2018). Her work is represented in the collections of the Amos Rex Art Museum, Helsinki; Dallas Museum of Art; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Helsinki Art Museum; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art, Vaasa, Finland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the UBS Art Collection, among others.

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