“The tragic fate of feeling”
The latest and long cycle of recent works by Elke Warth step into the parlors of memory and projected personal sentiment. There appear many figures, painted one by one in a seemingly traditional portrait-painting tradition. Instead of prominent subjects of commissions, from people the artist has never met before the sitting, we find young adolescents to whom the artist is personally linked. The portraits, surely, resemble the sitters but there is a twist of bitter nostalgia that transforms youth into icons of impossible love, loneliness, loss and the willingness to endure the tragic fate of feelings. Elke has known her subjects long before the moment of the portrait, it is therefore inevitable that she also paints what emotionally unites her to each of those faces, to their real stories and to common memories.
-Kspaces Torino archive
