We have the great pleasure to present Jessica Faiss’ second solo exhibition, Timeline, at Galleri Flach. It includes a number of large paintings and a video work, based on a landscape in motion. The title of the exhibition is linked to one of the paintings that appear like a long sequence in motion along the room. The painting moves through a landscape and shifts in both character and intensity, as life itself on a timeline.
The works of Jessica Faiss often focus on motions and on existential conditions that are often evoked by travelling through a landscape. During the travel the landscape may alter from forest into an open terrain, villages become suburbs, which in turn grow into large cities. This state of transition is a recurrent theme that the artist has worked on in different environments, reflecting both on external and internal movements and conditions.
In the exhibition Timeline, the focus is nevertheless on painting that has emerged through a course of years, departing from a mountain landscape. The texture of the painting has a special kind of airiness and transparency by the oil paint that is laid on a transparent surface, either on a light-permeable paper or on canvas. The composition of the painting alternates between dense and less intense parts of the canvas, in a movement reminiscent of musical pace intervals. The density of the composition builds up and declines in a kind of a rhythm pattern.
The exhibition also includes a video work that is a kind of double exposure of an outer and inner reflection. In the film we move along on a road through a forest just before nightfall. We can alternately discern the road and the contours of the forest from the light in the sky or from a pair of headlights. Jessica Faiss is grown up in the Swiss mountain but since long a resident in Sweden in close contact with the Swedish forest-rich nature. In the video we can experience an elevated inner sense of presence, which often occurs during an idle travel through these kind of terrains, that triggers thought processes of both recently experienced or many years kept events and memories.
Jessica Faiss graduated from University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in 2002 and has since then worked continuously with painting, photography and video. In 2013 she received The Moving Image Award in London for the video ”Solitude”. Her video works were part of the touring exhibition ”Nordic Outbreak” (New York, Sao Palo and Johannesburg). She is currently working on a public artwork for a new train station in Stockholm, Stockholm Odenplan (City banan).