The mystifying paintings of Emilie Terlinden (°1983, BE) emerge through a careful selection of images from the Renaissance and objects from her everyday environment. Though the images remain recognizable to the viewer as references to a specific era, a series of careful manipulations makes them entirely the artist’s own. Before being given their fixed place on the canvas, the images are transformed by being folded, alienating them from their original form. These interventions strip the subjects of their familiar historical context and promote them to the protagonists in a new, sophisticated staged spectacle.

The techniques and the way in which the material is used also hark back to the history of the images from which the paintings are construed. The staging techniques used by the artist have many connections with Emilie’s predilection for pre-cinema. Her preliminary studies often make use of magic lanterns that completely withdraw the object from the reality in which it was located. The controlled painting technique completes the abstraction. This working method combines a wide variety of technical actions that make time itself an important factor in Terlinden’s process. The time that elapses between the different steps in the artistic process enhances the final effect of the artist’s works, in which the images used literally lose their time.