Monica Majoli

A hazy portrait modeled with nothing but light and shadow, a facial profile captured in a few tender strokes, both offset against and intertwined within one another and bordered by the contours of the printing plates. While editions represent an exception within Monica Majoli’s oeuvre, their process of creating was similarly time-intensive to the development of her other works. The title, Amy Used Twice (block), hints at the laborious technical process of production based on a combination of two intaglio print techniques, aquatint and etching. “Used twice” verbalizes this layering of the prints, suggesting the multi-stage approach to the result, but also the artist’s repeated returning to a subject and her relation to the portrayed, who is “used” as both a model and a surface for projection.

This work is located within the context of Majoli’s Black Mirror series. Produced over multiple years, the work cycle is based on photographs Majoli took of former lovers in her bedroom, whose walls are lined with black mirrors (so-called Claude glasses). One of them, Amy, appears in two works: the oil painting Black Mirror (Amy) (2011) and Amy #2 (2010), a colored pencil drawing on paper. By repeatedly circling the same motif, it is set in motion and inverted: the focus shifts from the person depicted, the external, to the self, the internal, reformulating the vocabulary of a (self-)portrait. Factual and fictional, physical and emotional, intimate but elusive; moments of reflection are superimposed over one another, producing an ambiguous image that can simultaneously be interpreted as an autobiographical contemplation, an objective depiction of a particular person, or an abstract representation of collective or even universal sentiments. In it, the memory of what is absent, past, or lost is reconciled with the evocation of what is present, what remains, and what has become.

– Clara Maria Blasius