OBSERVING TIME / WHILE WE LIVE
by Marta Cereda

Sophie Westerlind’s painting is slow. It needs time to manifest itself. In fact, it requires different layers of time. First, the time of life, which the artist observes in detail. Then, the time of photographs, which she mainly shoots using a compact 35mm camera, like the ones that before the era of digital photography, accompanied us in our travels and experiences. Thus, a first phase is when the artist’s gaze meets that of her subjects, whom she often asks to pose, perhaps within the cramped spaces of the precarious life they share: a female friend in the shower, another one asleep, a bespectacled, somewhat gangly boy staring at us from behind his thick glasses.

Then comes the time for developing. Not all photographs match the image imprinted in the mind. Some are burned, some are too dark, others overexposed. Some are the only survivors of a trip, when a film roll forgotten in the luggage meets an airport scanner. More time, more waiting, more distance between what was lived, what is remembered, and what will finally be seen.

But one should not think that everything passes through the filter of photography. Alongside the film rolls, there are museums. The first ones were those Westerlind walked through as a student in London, experienced as an extension of public libraries or of her own living room. There was a room in the National Gallery she often returned to, Room 22, which houses portraits painted by Rembrandt. Those were the years of the Masters, spent between London, Venice, and exhibitions chased across Europe: Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Lucian Freud, for the freedom of their mark; Paula Modersohn-Becker and Alice Neel, for the intimacy of their gaze; Richard Gerstl and Marlene Dumas, for the emotional intensity of their colour; Tintoretto, for the construction of light.

During those same years, she filled sketchbooks during concerts, performances, plays, and theatrical rehearsals. She drew bodies that moved, stopped, and disappeared a moment later. Her gaze fixed, her hands in motion. Even today, alongside the paintings built through photography and memory, Westerlind continues to practice drawing and painting from life. Still lifes, landscapes, and figures become opportunities to confront changing light, shifting colours, and lengthening shadows. While photographic images introduce a distance that the painting can slowly process, these works are born instead from the need to create a physical, immediate relationship with the subjects, to hold onto something while it happens, out of the awareness of being in the present.

Always, therefore, comes the time for painting, which can manifest itself immediately, when, indeed, she works from life, or rather after days, months, years, when the memory is mediated by photographs. When that specific moment has been processed to the point where it can be rewritten. Then the room in which Westerlind paints—currently in Paris, with stops dictated by the nomadic life of artist residencies—becomes saturated with the smell of oil paint, slowly spread over the linen canvas. One touch after another, one brushstroke after another, with a rhythm dictated not only by the artist’s hand, but also by memory.

Clouds, skies, bodies, seas, fabrics: all surfaces unify and liquefy. The water is denser, the brushstrokes thinner, tighter, swirling, while the skies open, the oil is stretched, and the rhythm relaxes, even though those skies are never completely serene.

Everything unravels in memory; everything condenses into a fluid painting. It could be tablecloths with porcelain ware painted with roses and heavy, almost oxidized silver cutlery, or sheets upon which rests a figure we cannot recognize. They are crumpled. We see the fabric enveloped around the naked body, turning its back, with the face hidden in the pillow. Without any fear of the back becoming the sheets, of using the same brush: here is an ash-grey streak on the skin. The same bed, will it be the same? The framing is wider now. The room is empty, but the sheets are equally agitated in the daylight that illuminates an abandoned blanket, almost like a stream. Almost like the one that, in yet another painting, a girl in a swimsuit is crossing, anchoring herself to a boulder to ford and reach the opposite bank, with its dense, sunny, and green woods. Her skin is already tanned, the tonal difference left by the swimsuit is clearly visible, the mark of a summer that will become another memory.

But the faces are always hazily defined, like characters from a dream. We do not know, then, if the girls swimming in the rippling sea, in the wake of the sun that illuminates the surface of the water and could almost be a starry sky, a milky way, are the same ones we find in the duller water of another painting. Perhaps the sea is less deep, or perhaps the water isn’t even salty here, near the diving platform. Yet it is clear, you can glimpse the movement beneath the surface, the legs kicking as they try to stay afloat.

Sophie Westerlind’s paintings seem crossed by the same light of memory, which defines things and simultaneously dissolves them. What remains is the quiet of an Italian Sunday, gnocchi eaten at lunch, a dog asleep in a shaft of sunlight, a distant sea, the one from back home, rippled by the wind and the cold. In her paintings, there is no clear hierarchy between figures and landscape, between interior and exterior, between body and nature. Everything participates in the same movement, in the same fluid and unstable matter. There, everything is nature in Westerlind, everything is body, everything is now, because everything is painting.