From her White Cube page:
Jerry Saltz once described painting as “…one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented, and among the most effective ways to alter reality, see it better, or invent a new one.”
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For Altfest's second New York exhibition in 2005, the writer and artist David Humphrey elaborates on her practice:
"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 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."
