Google “beautiful” or “beauty”, and you will mostly find images of young women. White and thin, with flawless white teeth and smooth skin. Search for “ugly”, and your screen will be filled with crooked teeth, large noses, distorted faces or exaggerated grimaces. Search results illustrate definitions, norms, stereotypes, and the collective understanding of our time, a kind of negotiated reality between the algorithm and its users.




But after more than a decade of actively using Google Images, one thing has become increasingly clear to me: algorithms are poor at representing what exists in between. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. An average body. An everyday meal. An amateurish composition. A photograph so blurry that its subject can barely be identified. People as animalistic beings while devouring a burger late at night. Double chins caught in genuine laughter. Laundry hanging in the background of a sexy home photoshoot. A faded sign for an independent hair salon. Images that reveal the banal, the ambivalent, the imperfect, the pathetic, the tasteless, or that in one way or another resist the dominant visual narratives that shape our everyday lives online.

It is these narratives within today's image culture that form the subject of my artistic inquiry, whether they are the orchestrated dominant narratives or the stories excluded from them. This might be the narrative of romantic love (NEVER FELT LIKE THIS) and its accompanying symbols, such as diamond rings and red roses, or political narratives (Tell Me What I Want to Hear) and their protagonists. It may also involve images and objects that stand apart from contemporary trends or are associated with different social classes or cultures (Arguineguin, TAKE OUT). 

The Tea Party, 2020. Oil on canvas, 203x246 cm

By taking images that are already culturally coded, images, people, or objects that we have become so accustomed to seeing in a particular way that we barely notice them, and removing them from their familiar surroundings, placing them in new contexts, they become available for renewed critical attention. This may involve combining images digitally in new ways, but it can also mean moving an image out of the overcrowded universe of the internet and into a physical object.

But not just any object. By translating an image created for rapid circulation online into a slow, labour-intensive, handcrafted object such as a figurative painting, a friction emerges between the image's original function and the sustained attention that painting demands. At the same time, the image itself changes status, from a photograph retrieved from the endless flow of the internet into a figurative painting, a medium that has historically been associated with high cultural and economic value, and continues to be so today.

As a student of art history, I became particularly interested in the role figurative painting has played in shaping collective ideas of religion, monarchy, and national identity. Paintings reveal the norms of their time, both within the history of painting itself and within society more broadly. I have been especially drawn to painters such as Caravaggio (1571-1610), Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and Édouard Manet (1832-1883), who challenged the visual systems of their own time by including prostitutes, street boys, and workers in their paintings – people and experiences that had been excluded from the prestigious world of fine arts. This represented a break with painting's traditional role as something beautiful, elevated, and refined, expectations that, many centuries later, still remain attached to the medium.

Images teach us what is beautiful, what is vulgar, who deserves attention, and who remains invisible. In a world saturated with images, my job is not to produce more of them, but to examine those that already exist.

Photo: Willa Wathne