Film scenes, stories captured on TV screens, photographs... All of these images have distinctive features that emerge from the once analogue and now technologically advanced instruments that infuse them with unique characteristics, to which our eyes are incredibly sensitive. The two-dimensionality, the deformations of the camera angles, the blurred outlines of the main characters depending on the light in which the scene is set, the nebulous atmosphere that is at the same time recognisable as a snapshot in our memory, are the basis from which Anelys Wolf transfers pieces of stories to painting.
Multiple scenes remain present in our memory that, depending on the technology used at the time, are perceived visually with features that also define the feeling of their time, connecting us with different discourses, emotions and aspects of our lives.
Anelys Wolf draws on the current role of painting and photography, generating in her work an aesthetic that plays between the visual qualities produced by cameras and those created by painting.
In her canvases she uses the texture of paint, fading the faces of the main characters and somehow intervening in the story by blurring their identity, perhaps taking away the weight of the events or the authority they held.
Through this story re-enactment of events we knew but never experienced we gain access to distant situations that, if impacting our consciousness enough, will become part of our vital memories.
These images are loaded with symbolic weight inside our minds, independent of an immediate context as they are photographic, television or film images; but yet offer the possibility of having an intimate and personal link with ourselves and our own history.
Wolf generally paints from photographs and scenes from film and television, references which, through their framing, are evident in her paintings. The choice of these stills as the starting point for her paintings shows Anelys Wolf's inclination towards narrative, a theme that permeates all her work.
Anelys Wolf was born in Valdivia in 1974. Today she lives and works on the Lacuy peninsula in Ancud, Island of Chiloé , southern Chile. She has a degree in visual arts from University of Chile.