Andim Spent.

Lung 353 - Self Portrait from Memory.

Russell Oliver. Words cannot describe how much I love this.

Gabriel Dawe, Plexus.

Ellen Altfest’s paintings resonate with me for a few simple reasons. I like that they are skilful and direct in a time when it seems that not much art is. It is also refreshing that her subjects are male. I appreciate that her bodies are ordinary ones, and much more likely to be like yours or mine than the bodies normally seen in media or art.

In choosing her subject, importance is immediately attached to it. By spending months painstakingly detailing it, instead of photographing it, for example – more importance is attached. Finally, that her chosen medium is in oil on canvas ipso facto – rightly or wrongly – culturally elevates it. In this way I find her paintings quietly celebratory.

Many of my own– no, all of my own body hangups are a product of fear. Fear of cruelly lit changing rooms, fear that I’ll never be able to lose weight, fear of my body slowly, gently, persistently dying day by day and the constant underlying gut instinct that my personage will be finally judged as not good enough. My inkling is that in this I am far from alone.

A painting exists at a level removed from day-to-day reality and seems less explicit than a photograph. Much in the way that a behavioural therapist will begin to help overcome a phobia of snakes or bees by gradually and progressively exposing a person to the object of their fear, so Altfest’s pictures subject the viewer to a representation of the body in all its embarrassing, basal manifestation. A confrontation takes place between painting and viewer, and if you don’t look away Altfest ensures that you see every wrinkle, every sag, every mole. In this viewer’s case, it turns out to be not so frightening after all. For this reason too I value her work.

Perhaps less admirably, Altfest’s paintings also tap into my need for control. The meticulous transcription of every hair and every pore, every organic human imperfection, is somehow comforting, especially in a subject so inherently chaotic and changeable. There is an innate human desire for completeness and closure, to wrap up snugly and contain; I am brought to mind of the annoyance and vague disturbance felt when the radio is turned off mid-song; a thousand other parallels might be drawn. As early as Velazques the disrupting capacity of pictures was realised; Las Meninias simply doesn’t make sense. Many contemporary painters tap into this disrupting capability, mixing planes and inventing pictorial space, as well as subtler intervention. Disturbance is laid out on the canvas, and then we ourselves feel disturbed.

As an artist who has previously been obsessed with painting in hyper-realism (although my paintings were slicker, embarrassingly driven by a compulsion to perfect and endlessly blend), I am reminded of the profound satisfaction felt when a painting is completed, fulfilled in the knowledge that I could not have captured my subject better. In retrospect I identify a kind of ownership; if I could capture my subject then I was surely master over it too.

In this age of fast-paced technological innovation we are bombarded with an unprecedented number of images every single day. These images hold enormous influence, persuading us to buy products and look, feel and act a certain way; causing us to believe that conventions are indisputable truths, ‘natural,’ ‘right’ or even self-evident instead of a product of our time and culture. Thoughts and feelings are fleeting and difficult to pin down, and in lives lived at a break-neck speed with little time for reflection influence becomes even more insidious. Images jostle and compete with reality. I’m groping around clumsily for what I’m trying to say – I’m afraid I can’t think of how to better approach it. When everything is grey and nothing can be determined for sure, images have authority, including Altfest’s. Painters in particular, as image-makers go, hold immense authority. Artists are still believed to possess the magic key that unlocks the truth of the human condition. Altfest’s paintings are comforting because she has painted for us, she has observed for us. A package is presented to us; the judgment is made. We have only to accept it.

Amanda Fucking Palmer, Oasis.

Milena Dragicevic, from the British Art Show 2011.

Rose Nolan.