While the panel paintings resemble austere paintings housed in chapels, the oil on tracing paper paintings are closer to the marginalia in medieval manuscripts, or the small retablos in the homes of the devout. In these tracing paper paintings there is a correlation between religious imagery and online fan art. Both are devotional images produced by a community of individuals, based on and reinterpreting a central canon, and both are equally informed by their own preceding histories and the broader cultural impressions at the time of their production. This process concentrates representation into shorthand symbolism. Here the depictions of saints and deities are replaced by equally familiar icons and logos: anime characters, video game sprites, Microsoft clipart, ornate hearts and angel wings. The configurations of disparate illustrations and styles of painting recall ciphers, asemic writing, and pictogrammes.
Smith Studio.

January 19, 2022

On Love, Death, and the Divine: Reading Gitte Maria Möller’s work through the Major Arcana | Artthrob | M Thesen Law

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