While Fee Kleiss’s foundation is, granted, painting, the artist also works on waste, objects, old clothes, photos, and magazines, accumulating and repurposing them, to then incorporate them to her paintings or transform them into standalone volumes. In her world, nothing is lost,¹ nothing is denied, and anything can happen.

In this way, transformation is at the core of the process from which this new body of works was born, under the enigmatic title l’Œil de l’Ail (The Eye of Garlic). The title, in turn, echoes one of her previous works, referring to an eye and garlic —another form of repurposing…

As “puppet mistress,” Fee Kleiss has her elements —paint and objects— interact like bit players in two- or three-dimensional “tableaux vivants.” Her approach is free, intuitive, and playful, but not without clear intent: to create a dialogue between old painting techniques and material fragments of our time. The space thus created bears a strong visual identity, whilst remaining very open, and even undefined. Beauty, humour, poetry, and depths coexist —in a spectrum of possibilities and suggestions.

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In l’Œil de l’Ail, the artist considered closely advertising leaflets from supermarkets. With their gaudy pictures and graphics, these cheap editions gather together all current promotions and discounts —be it food, alcohol, hygiene products, or house plants… Much more than mere symbols of our consumer society, the images and promotional texts cut out and carefully reproduced in painting by the artist also become the portraits of another dimension of contemporary life: one identifying products like vessels for our dreams and desires, going much further than simply meeting vital needs. By painting them in the trompe-l’œil tradition, Fee Kleiss gives them a new life, where they can melt into the abstract spaces
created on canvas. The result is baffling: what looks like a collage turns out to be, on closer inspection, an integral part of the painted material, an “odd one out” in the form of a wine bottle or a pastry… From there begins a transition toward a new perception, toward a sort of a stage, where the object (the bit player) starts to animate itself.

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