Another perfect day

Another perfect day is an overview of Janet Werner’s production over the past five years. The paintings signal an ongoing engagement with the historically established practice of portraiture but one that is ultimately rerouted and subverted. In Werner’s paintings, the canons of beauty and likeness that attend conventional portraiture are abandoned in favor of deeply internalized, subjective and renegade purposes. Werner’s portraits, even when sourced from high fashion images manifest unconventional beauty, turning the portrayed figures into specters that defy anatomical accuracy. The paintings are rife with physical mutations and set up complex psychological conditions; they lean towards the irrational but reveal a kind of deviant logic. For Werner, the process of painting is a way of investigating the iconic power of the image, invoking imagination, memory and projection to invest nameless figures with human (sometimes monstrous) character and a disturbing array of emotions. The final paintings are composite fictional portraits that retain aspects of the original source while embodying notions of transformation, desire, innocence, loss and defiance.

In Werner’s most recent paintings an argument has erupted between beauty and the grotesque where the figure itself has become the site of contest. Folded, cut, occluded, or altered, with color ranging from luminous to ashen, and scale shifting from pixie to giant, the figures possess an otherworldly aspect. There is a subtle suggestion of alchemy or witchcraft in these portraits, though it is not clear if these beings are the ones casting spells or the ones upon whom the spells are cast.