TRANSLATION:
“ I’m using the medium that corresponds the best to what I want to do. This way of working
helps me to view my work from another angle. […] Sometimes a dialogue happens between the different works and sometimes a piece lives all alone.”! 1.
One often finds the same themes in the three different mediums that Mia Enell uses (drawing, painting and photography). Each of them keeps nevertheless its specificity. The photographies with their sharp colors, printed full frame without being reworked, are a raw exploration of reality. With great spontaneity, drawings often mix words and images, creating in this way a narrative thread. Words take also an important place in the paintings of this young swedish artist, whether penetrating into the space of the canvas or appearing in the titles, most of the time, as play on words.
As with her drawings and photography, Mia Enell find her subjects of her paintings in the elements of a society that is both multicultural and immediately recognizable. But she undertakes then to slightly transform these objects borrowed from this common reality, creating in this way a pictural univers bordering the real and the fantasmagorical. This duality is found again in the composition of many paintings, expressed through the symetry and the repetition of the model, as well as in the colors, which, sometimes mat, sometimes acidly sharp, detache themselves on a smooth and neutral surface.
Beyond the apparent lightness and simplicity of her painting, it is the complexity of the world that Mia Enell is searching to reveal to us. And sometimes also it is its cruelty: these pink shapes sandwiched between hamburgerbreads in “Emburgered” are not food but indeed human faces.
Sophie Kaplan
1. Interview with Oliver Reneau, in catalogue Just Showing, Icap, Paris, 1997
