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 in Jakarta, Indonesia) is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist 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 creative 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, and subtle animation. 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

The paintings do not match, and that's the point.

My practice began as a return to the first thing I ever loved, after two decades spent designing for other people. When I stood in front of a canvas in 2018, I thought I was painting the sea, with no idea that I was beginning a self-portrait.

The first painting showed a turbulent ocean surface, wind moving across water, nothing yet broken open. I called it Winds over Waters. I did not understand it at the time. Looking back, I was painting the moment just before everything in me began to shift, the disturbance on the surface that comes before what rises from below.

What followed arrived without a plan: a wave, a waterfall, stones, an asteroid, schools of fish, shadows, faces, and eventually flowers. The media changed, the scale changed, the style changed, and the works look as though different hands had made them. In a sense they had, because I was not the same person from one canvas to the next.

I never set out to make this body of work. It became a forensic record of identity dissolving and reforming, painted one or two canvases a year, in the quiet days when the house was empty and my children were away. Each painting marks a specific moment in a process I could only read once it was behind me: the stirring, the washing, the foundation, the destruction, the wound, the acceptance, and finally the flourishing.

The knife compresses while the brush searches, and the layers keep what the surface has already moved past. I have come to understand identity as something that accumulates, gathering beneath you and pressing on everything above it, until the light shifts one day and shows you what was there the whole time.

Now I paint beauty: flowers, meadows, the way light comes through grass. I treat these paintings as evidence. They show that the process completed something, and that what broke apart became the condition for what is now flowering.

I do not make work about transformation. I make work that transformation made.