CURATORSVOICE

Mona von Wittlage’s work unfolds at the intersection of belief, vulnerability and disappearance. Rather than opposing illusion and truth, her paintings examine illusion as a functional response to existential fragility. In series such as Illusion Survival Kit, the artist appropriates marginal visual cultures — street flyers, vernacular promises, commercial rhetoric — and transforms them into unsettling portraits of collective desire. These works do not ridicule belief; they expose its necessity.

At the other end of the spectrum, memory becomes the dominant force. The Père-Lachaise Monochromatics and the Blind or Shadow Paintings shift the focus from projection to persistence. Here, von Wittlage’s restrained formal language refuses spectacle. Light, erosion, touch and time become active agents. Memory is neither stable nor monumental; it is contingent, threatened, and therefore urgent.

What unites these bodies of work is their ethical precision. Von Wittlage does not aestheticize suffering, nor does she offer consolation. Her paintings operate instead as spaces of attention — where illusion and memory are acknowledged as parallel survival mechanisms, each incomplete, each necessary.

Von Wittlage’s practice can be read as a sustained inquiry into what might be called “everyday metaphysics.” Her work does not engage belief systems at the level of doctrine, but at the level of use. Illusion, in this sense, is not false consciousness; it is an adaptive fiction. In Illusion Survival Kit, the artist demonstrates how late-modern subjects outsource hope to simplified narratives that promise mastery over love, time and loss.

Conversely, memory in von Wittlage’s work is stripped of nostalgia. The monochromatic tomb sculptures of Père-Lachaise and the luminous, unstable figures of the Blind or Shadow Paintings resist closure. Memory here is not preservation, but friction — a resistance against the total erasure of meaning.

What distinguishes this work within contemporary figurative practice is its refusal of excess. There is no accumulation of imagery, no theatrical pathos. Instead, von Wittlage constructs a visual ethics of restraint. Her paintings do not ask to be believed; they ask to be considered.