Connecting people through art 

Since the end of the 1990’s, Finnish artist Elina Brotherus has confronted photography and video with the subjects of classical figurative painting. A concern with light, colour and composition reveals a rigorous formal and visual language while operating within an aesthetic of the immediate – specific to photography – in which nudes and landscapes are captured from life, “surprised” by reality.

In the video Baigneurs (2003), the naked bodies, seen from behind, free of any anecdotal or narrative connotation, enter and leave the field of an idyllic image of a Finnish landscape of luminous serenity. The artist concentrates attention around the immobile nature, filmed frontally with a static camera, through which the moving bodies pass. The human figure becomes the object of a purely formal investigation, similar to self-portraits in which a physical presence converses with the horizon in an atmosphere of calm and contemplation, a eulogy of a “window open to the world”.