Ellen Altfest asks us to slow down, to crawl, to feel our way across the variegated surfaces of her depicted objects until we experience them as materialized hallucinations. The dense skin of her paintings invites us to travel into nether-spaces of bewildering complexity where we become lost in a thoroughly mapped world right in front of our eyes.Altfest's work is an exercise of extreme and deliriously inefficient will seeking both accuracy and metaphor. Altfest looks at her motif then looks away to perform precise labors in the fading memory of that perception, over and over again. Everything must be touched into existence, part by part. In her painting of a tumbleweed, Altfest first immobilizes it in the corner of her studio and then renders it on the canvas. But our eye continuously tumbles through the weed's tangled geodesics to find purchase in its many areas of perplexing coherence.The tumbleweed, like all her subjects, suggests a brain, a world or an animate being, before inevitably cycling back to its origin as nothing special. Ellen Altfest's paintings celebrate the way objects become engulfed by their surroundings and simple acts of identification multiply and transform. Her disciplined vigilance encourages an ecstasy of matter and vision. - David Humphrey 2005



Ellen Altfest's paintings exude an experiential quality: capturing the transference the impact of looking as it becomes imprinted in memory,Focussing on the male member, Ellen Altfest's Penis is painting up close and personal. Drawing from the hyper-realism of Chuck Close's portraits, Altfest approaches her intimate subject with detailed obsession.

Find more about Ellen Altfest Artist or looking for his paintings at the Saatchi-Gallery