Mythra Schwartz
Sourced from an online advertisement, Between us investigates how sexuality circulates through contemporary image cultures, where desire is endlessly staged, performed, and commodified. Drawing from the languages of still life and the nude, the work reframes conventions of intimacy so that the erotic is at once suggested and obscured. Within this tension, banality becomes charged with eroticism, while eroticism slips toward banality.
More broadly, my practice inquiries into how painting reorients our relationship to images in a culture shaped by speed, legibility, and saturation. I work with fragments drawn from film stills, online images and personal archives, using cropping, blur, soft rendering, and bleach to reenact the structure of desire: recursive, delayed, unresolved. Painting becomes a way to interrupt visual consumption, restoring ambiguity, uncertainty, and longing to the act of looking.