Allison Meier's essay Art That Was Always Meant to Be Hidden for Hyperallergic explored Oliver JeffersDipped Paintings Series. Jeffers performance involves painting, memory and witnessing.
Meiers writes
Absence was the undercurrent of the evening, both in the paintings and the subjects, who Jeffers selected as having each experience some type of heavy loss. As he explained to me, he was inspired by both quantum physics and classical art, and the scientific logic against emotions. Like the paintings, once something is permanently gone, whether it’s someone who dies or an image destroyed, you have to rely on an “imperfect memory,” as he described it. Even out of sight, I know that if I look at the portrait with its obscuring cover of turquoise in the future, an echo of the original will be there, distorted over time into a personal recollection. And with the others, there’s a curiosity about the lost details that can never be retrieved. More
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| Oliver Jeffers, “Dipped Paintings” performance (photograph by Kacy Jahanbini) |
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| Oliver Jeffers, Without a Doubt Part 1, 2012, Oil on canvas dipped in enamel, 20 x 16" |