Nathanaëlle Herbelin in Zwölf

Nathanaëlle Herbelin’s painting takes its cue from everyday, often intimate scenes, which nevertheless never appear purely documentary. She transforms interiors, figures and situations into pictorial spaces in which memory, observation and construction intertwine. The familiar loses its taken-for-granted nature and becomes part of a fragile pictorial logic. Central to her work is her handling of light and colour, which underpin the entire pictorial structure. Subdued tones and soft transitions create a dense atmosphere in which figures and spaces appear to hover between presence and detachment – less as scenes than as condensed moments of perception. The relationship between proximity and distance characterises many of her works: figures elude the gaze, whilst intimacy and distance coexist. Space, too, is structuring, often slightly shifted and perspectivally unstable, so that it seems to arise from subjective perception. Herbelin combines figurative painting with a sensitivity to ambivalence and openness. Her images eschew clear narratives and condense the everyday into multi-layered constellations that cannot be fully resolved.