Monica Majoli

Themes of absence, projection, attachment and temporality have informed Majoli’s work over the past 20 years. Across shifts in subject matter and materiality, her paintings often instigate voyeurism or triangulation with the viewer through the visual reenactment and documentation of actual events, sexual activities and personal relationships. In this latest group of works, Majoli has returned to autobiographical material in mid-life, not as an examination of identity as expressed through sexuality, but as an interrogation of her romantic history through the visages of a series of former lovers. Captivated by the eerie half-image reflected in walls of black mirror in her home, Majoli explores the shared properties of mirror and painting as fetish and surrogate. Her darkly luminescent oil paintings obscure and reveal their subjects, using the mirror as both source material and historical context to question processes of romantic projection and disappointment, absorption and disappearance. This series stands as a kind of inverted self-portrait through the depiction of a private chronicle of passion, impossibility and failure; an attempt at reparation through the act of painting.