Painting allows me to introduce a sense of resistance to the immaterial and immediate surface of digital images. It reaffirms the presence of the body, of touch, and of materiality. Even when I draw on pre-existing images or references from contemporary visual culture, their pictorial transposition transforms them profoundly. The painted surface becomes a place where time, repetition and hesitation are inscribed. My interest in the female figure stems from a desire to re-examine the ways in which she is represented. Rather than presenting a static or idealised image, I seek to reveal its constructions, its artifice, its tensions. The woman thus appears both as the subject and as the medium of the painting itself, a terrain where issues of visibility, seduction and projection play out.
Nathalie Pirotte is a Belgian painter who lives and works in Brussels. Specializing in masked portraits, she draws her inspiration from cinema, pink colors, animals, lace, flowers and hybridizations of all kinds. It’s not just a search for identity, but also for the medium of painting in the age of Photoshop. Oscillating between surrealism, pop culture and mythology, his work raises the question of the seduction of painting. Since her studies at Parson’s School of Design in New York and Ensav La Cambre, she has mounted numerous solo exhibitions in Luxembourg, Munich, Cologne and Brussels. Her work has been shown in countless group exhibitions and international fairs, and can be found in numerous museums and private collections.
Exploring the hybridization of commercial and popular imagery sourced from mass media, this body of work uses cut-and-paste aesthetics to construct contemporary portraits. The result is a narrative painting practice, subtly infused with erotic dreamscapes. Pictorial masks and collage elements reveal the tension between viewer and subject—between seeing and being seen. What does one choose to conceal or expose of the body, especially in portraiture, in a post-digital era shaped by the web, video art, performance, selfies, and pornographic webcams? The boundaries between public and private have grown increasingly fluid. These works blend intimacy with hyper-mediated production, abstraction with figuration, gestural impasto with almost watercolor-like transparency. Masked portraits emerge featuring animal-headed figures—rabbits, deer, felines—pagan-like demi-goddesses embodying the spirit of Painting itself. Thick, symbolic paint gestures—pink or black impastos—serve as expressive masks over surfaces that remain deliberately light, ethereal.