About Painting

Henni Alftan

Salvo

Andreas Schulze

Shinsegae Gallery Cheongdam presents About Painting, bringing together three European painters—Salvo (1947–2015, Italy), Andreas Schulze (b. 1955, Germany), and Henni Alftan (b. 1979, Finland; based in Paris)—who, rather than dismantling the medium, work from within painting’s own means to renew the act of looking.

The project originated with a proposal by the late Pasquale Leccese, who maintained close ties with Salvo and Schulze, and was first realized in London in 2024 as a two-person presentation. In Seoul, Alftan joins the conversation, extending it to include the contemporary visual lexicon—cropping, framing, focus, and negative space—translated into painterly terms.

Organized along three interwoven axes—light and time; framing; and the staging of the scene—the exhibition lays out how painting recalibrates perception. The installation is tuned so that viewers gradually register shifts of tone and tempo across the galleries. The route opens in quiet with Alftan’s restrained palette and close framing, accelerates through Schulze’s sharp contrasts and rhythmic shifts, and resolves in Salvo’s temporal sequence, where color grades into time—dawn to noon, dusk to night—so that chromatic change is read as the movement of time.

Since his decisive return to painting around 1973, Salvo developed a distinctive synthesis of classical composition and heightened, artificial color to evoke natural light across different hours and seasons. The Seoul presentation focuses on series titled after months and places, in which depopulated cities, coastlines, and architecture become temporal fields where light and hue render time visible. Works are arranged by gradations of tone and by a temporal sequence so that the viewer can follow color as a register of duration and memory.

Andreas Schulze constructs scenes in which objects, signs, and architectural cues inhabit emptied interiors and suburban structures like stage sets—moments where meaning is orchestrated and allowed to recede. Indicators of movement and action amplify the pulse of the picture. Working in a deliberately direct, unpretentious idiom that intersects with languages from Pop and Abstract Expressionism as well as subtle optical effects and patterning, Schulze produces images in which humor coexists with a subtle unease. Through his calibrations of form, structure, and space, painting shows how meaning emerges, shifts, and dissolves, positioning the viewer in the interval between stage and audience.

Henni Alftan translates devices from photography and cinema—tight crops, shallow focus, intentional blur—into a painter’s grammar. Extending pigment around the edges of the canvas, she treats the picture not as a flat image but as a painted object, sustaining a tension between the suggestion of space beyond the frame and the work’s physical presence. Her scenes appear to capture moments from daily life, yet they originate in an analytic probing of memory, imagination, and image-making itself, prompting viewers to reframe visual habits.

Set within the contemporaneity of Frieze Seoul, this iteration underlines the pace and material presence that painting can reclaim in an era of hyper-circulated digital imagery. Stepping aside from the tempo of rapid consumption, visitors are invited to move at painting’s cadence—recovering the depth and duration of the experience of looking. About Painting stages the practices of three generations in parallel and in mutual reflection, and returns the question to present-day Seoul: what do we see, how do we see it, and what do we choose to believe?