"TO SEE THE DIFFERENCE - TO SEE DIFFERENTLY"

Over many years, Madelaine Linden and Caroline Duchesne exchanged ideas and were sparring partners as Linden began to insert some of Duchesne’s photos into her work. “Because my painting begged for it” as she says. They share a sense of humour, their taste for the surreal, morbid and impossible.

One lives in England, the other in Germany. The advent of digital photography opened up the scope of the photographic medium, and their viewpoints converged to the point where they suddenly realised that, in some areas, they had become almost one, albeit contributing different eyes and skills.

Duchesne describes her technique as “Multiple imagery, as it describes the relationship between brain/eye and film/pixels. Without the enormous complexity of the one we cannot create the other”. This complexity is also the basis of the Photoshop software approach, which Linden uses like a paintbrush and paint: working in and with multiple levels.

Linden had been in search of a picture language in which the implicit uniqueness of the artist steps back, the origin and creatorship become unimportant. “The glare/scrutiny/view, the original handwriting combining it is the only thing that matters”, she says, eclipsing the vanity of the artist and allowing the picture to becomes the “star”. The development, the continuation of the idea comes into the forefront: composition and transformation emerge from the confrontation. Individuality, uniqueness merge in a complex testimony as intricate as each idea.

See  some examples under "ML using C. Duchesne's photography".