The Painting

(2023) 9 minutes

The Painting is a film about something greater than ourselves, in this case religion or the iconography of Jesus Christ. As a non-religious person, I find it fascinating how religion or belief can become an obsession, shape someone's life, and give meaning to existence. Through making this film, that fascination has grown immensely and now plays a significant role in my work.

The film began with the discovery of a painting of Jesus, hanging in a tree, exactly at the spot where I later shot the film. I had used this painting in a previous work, but I felt there was more to it, something worth exploring more deeply. I could immediately see it had been hanging there for a long time; it felt lost and forgotten. I started wondering how it had ended up there and who it had once belonged to. In a way, the film is a fantasy about the life and journey of this painting.

I’m interested in what happens when you place a figure or a person in a landscape, how things change, and how the environment and the human figure influence each other. A key theme in the film is dualism. By playing both characters myself, they share a lot in common while simultaneously being completely different, almost opposites or mirror images shown in a different light.