Alftan’s figurative paintings negotiate the relationship between medium and image, employing a subtle palette and flat rendering style to transform their everyday subject matter from object to motif. Her pared-down compositions connote a stillness that oscillates between monotony and anticipation.

As a painter Alftan is keenly aware of the long tradition of the medium, and her work deals freely in art-historical and pop-cultural references. The visual language and atmosphere of suspense cinema inspired her to leave the audience in a state of uncertainty. Quite often she shows that there is something you cannot see. 

In Nightstand (2021), this enigmatic withholding of supposed missing information happens on a number of levels at once: In a room we see a picture frame on a nightstand, its top drawer slightly ajar. Yet all we see of the frame is its image from the back, the contour of its shadow on the wall.

An instinctual need to derive meaning from images, to draw connections between them, can make it tempting to infer narratives from the paintings. And yet the scenes and objects have no immanent context, as they do not recreate real scenes. Alftan’s paintings seem to absorb their immediate surroundings.

She herself is an observer. “It’s my way of existing." The objects these paintings render—the information Alftan chooses to include or omit—encourage contemplation of the everyday. The paintings themselves invite viewers to share the artist’s perspective, to immerse themselves in her way of looking at the world.