Jennifer Cavegn
PAINTING, EXTENDED
I make paintings that keep going after the surface. Using augmented reality, sound, subtle movement, and light, I add layers that reveal themselves slowly, so the work unfolds over time instead of resolving in a single glance.
These layers are part of the structure, not decoration laid on top. The painted surface stays intact and remains the thing everything else moves through. What I am after is work that gives more the longer you stay with it.
Biography
Jennifer Cavegn (b. 1974, Jakarta, Indonesia) is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist of German and Chinese-Indonesian heritage, working between painting, sound, and emerging technologies. Raised across cultures and educated in London, Paris, and Milan, she trained first in industrial design, a background that shapes her attention to structure, composition, and material presence.
She spent over two decades as a senior art director in international agencies before turning fully to fine art in 2018, redirecting that craft toward slower, more sustained work.
Her recent paintings are large in scale and extend beyond the canvas through augmented reality, sound, subtle animation and interactivity. She writes, composes, and directs the digital layers herself, built to preserve rather than replace the painted surface. Positioned between the material and the immaterial, the works function as environments that reward prolonged attention. She lives and works in Switzerland, where her practice examines identity, surrender, and the way inner states become perceptible.
Statement
Across eight years, my paintings have become a forensic record of identity coming apart and forming again. The subject moved from water to stone, then to growing things, and finally to the human face. Beneath all of it runs the same reach toward something just outside the frame. I can't paint that thing. Each subject is where the reaching came to rest.
The paintings are large, so they meet a viewer at their own height. Most hold to a single colour, because one colour used with enough conviction carries more than a full palette can. The painted surface isn't where the encounter ends. Through augmented reality, I give each image a voice, sometimes several and sometimes in more than one language, until the still thing starts to move and speak. I've worked with the moving image since 1998. It's where the practice began.
The first painting was Winds over Waters: wind crossing an ocean surface, nothing yet broken open. I didn't understand it when I made it. Later I recognised the moment I'd painted, the one just before everything in me began to shift, when a disturbance crosses the surface before whatever's beneath it starts to rise.
That's how it has always worked. I follow a painting while I'm making it and understand it afterwards, so the work stays a step ahead of me. That gap keeps me painting. A picture I could explain to myself before starting is one I'd have no reason to make.
Side by side, the works look as if different hands had made them; in a way, they had. I wasn't the same person from one canvas to the next, and each painting belongs to whomever I was while I made it. I do not make work about transformation. I make work that transformation made.
