Paintings to Live In: Carmen Einfinger’s “seeCEOseen” at Broadway Gallery - Julia Draganovic

Carmen Einfinger, “seeCEOseen.”

In talking about artists who turn their life into art, one has to mention Carmen Einfinger as a primary representative of our day. Without any artificial attitude, Carmen Einfinger transforms every aspect of her everyday life into an art piece: her clothes, her furniture, her whole Soho loft, everything she deals with gets that colorful, mysterious and magical touch. The bright colors and the clear and simple, although very expressive shapes clearly derive from her Brazilian background. A background which is a self made one: born in Great Britain from Dutch and Croatian parents, Einfinger was brought up in Santos close to Rio de Janeiro. From her childhood on, she had to do everything by herself, even the creation of her own identity and the learning of her “mother tongue.” She now communicates with her Dutch mother with whom she once lived in Brazil in English—to choose just one of their common languages. Quite an invention of its own, the English that they speak is as colorful and expressive as Einfinger’s paintings. This communication is also as authentic as all those successful trials to construct her own identity, which Carmen Einfinger has always had to undertake.

In her new show “seeCEOseen” at the Broadway Gallery in New York, Carmen Einfinger is continuing a path she undertook during her recent stay in Beijing where she was working on her solo show “Wild Girls” at the NY Arts Beijing Gallery. The uniforms that the students of the International School in Beijing have to wear inspired Einfinger, who was raised in a Boarding School in Brazil. Uniforms are the contradictions, per se, of individuality. By painting portraits on shirts and skirts, Einfinger taught these teenagers a way to regain their originality without rebelling against the dress order. Einfinger found an artistic expression for Ernst Juenger’s theory of the “Anarch” who, unlike the anarchist who tries to destroy the system, keeps his identity and authenticity without rebelling against the common order but instead by undermining it in a subversive way.

Continuing this path in the United States, this meant for Carmen looking for the most common uniforms. Einfinger found them in the suits of businessmen and women who have to dress following a strict code that doesn’t allow a lot of originality. By painting portraits on the clothes they wear, Einfinger is giving evidence to the creativity of these personalities, who hide themselves in uniform like clothes.

The “seeCEOseen” show is dedicated to a bipolar child. Like everything in Carmen Einfinger’s life this detail is closely connected to her private experiences and therefore had to find its way in her art works. One of her neighbors has a bipolar daughter whom Carmen Einfinger met as a small child and who has been and is a friend and model for her art works for a long time. Einfinger noticed that the border between being “normal” and being “diverse” is very thin, if not a fact of a clinical definition that sometimes may seem arbitrary. What once in a while turns out to be a disturbing, often destructive disability, at other times may have the appearance of stunning beauty or surprising creativity.  The goal is to help them find a balance between the multiple sides of their characters.

In “seeCEOseen” Einfinger is working with the successful ones of the American society; with the ones that knows their way, with the ones that knows how to decide where to go and then they just go. Although their outfit usually tends to be sober and from an artistic point of view often lacking in imagination, to make a decision and follow a way of your own, which is the secret of successful business, is a question of creativity. Carmen Einfinger in her new series of photos of CEOs with their portraits on suits and of paintings of celebrities on common clothes, underlines the diversity of these personalities.

 
Carmen Einfinger’s “paintings to live in” are like a magical code that helps the colorful inner self of those imprisoned in their (business) rules to become visible—and even more powerful.

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