Gregory Forstner

The anachronistic energy that emanates from Gregory Forstner's oeuvre has entirely to do with the singularity of his working procedure. Rooted in a liking for the history of painting, his opening gesture is that of a sampling taken from the infinitesimal nature of the pictorial corpus. In re-enacting the paradoxes of what is near and what is far, the magnifying-glass effect emphasizes the material share of the painting and reveals the techniques of illusion. To an even greater extent, isolated on a neutral ground in the manner of Manet, Gregory Forstner's characters acquire an autonomy which projects them towards us in a kinetic dynamic. From blurredness to the clearly defined, from privacy to quotation, from detail to structure, the gaze circulates and mixes chords: the history of painting meets the voyeuristic aesthetic of tight framing, the hieratic figures of tales are combined with the visual fluidity of film, the unity of the historical reference makes compromises with contemporary fragmentation. Here it is the whole intimacy of the painting that is presented, under the hypnotic spotlights of disillusion.