Corinne Halbert – Penetrating the Vein

Paint means seduction, seduction means death: for every hunter, there is a fawn trembling in silent hysteria. Death is slow, yet sudden when it comes. There is his mouth, all anticipation. Here is my neck. (Corinne Halbert)

According to the legend, a vampire immediately turns to ashes when the first rays of sunlight hit his face. Daylight for the vampire is a feared danger, so that they only dare to come out of their coffins at night. Or they rise up between the pages of famous books studied by shivering readers in the candle's shivering light. But for the most part, vampires emerge in the darkness of movie theaters; protagonists of famous films, frightening audiences with their sanguine lust. Paradoxically then, the vampire; fearing the light, is only visible on film as a projection, as light cast upon a screen. This perhaps reflects one of his most noteworthy traits: As a creature of shadows, the vampire fascinates through his ambivalence. Dead and lost to time but always searching to live on, always immortal; he is a repellant figure, incapable of love but seductive in his domination. Rarely do vampires appear painted on canvas, exposed to the bright lights of a gallery. Filmmaker and painter Corinne Halbert has made use her experience with film and brought the vampire in from the shadows of the theater to the lights of the gallery:

Each painting becomes a moment within a sequence, as if frames on a film spool. In film, multiple frames make a second of time in the form of moving pictures. In my paintings, I want each piece to function as a grouping of frames or a still from a scene. In this way, the paintings are part of a larger narrative, born of imagination and light. This larger, growing and unfinished narrative cuts to the core of my work. (Corinne Halbert)

Halbert's characters are abstracted from Werner Herzog's 1979 release Nosferatu: the Vampyre; starring a deeply enigmatic Klaus Kinski and Isabella Adjani as the ravishing and strange Lucy Harker. The signal colors: black, white and red dominate her works. The vampire's ashen face and deep-set eyes; the victim's pale skin; her tempting blood red lips and long dark hair; the darkness of the surroundings and the blood running from the wound on her neck. A strange couple, united in an intimate play of domination and submission. The "sets" are lit as if for film, with all the dramatic power of lightning, creating shadows in a frightening atmosphere. And yet for all their cinematic atmosphere, these are paintings. Corinne Halbert has a passion and talent for the sensuality of paint. For her the process of painting, the brush gently gliding over the white virgin canvas completes the sensitive morbidity of Nosferatu and his kind.

CORINNE HALBERT was born in Anchorage Alaska in 1981. She did her undergraduate study at Massachusetts College of Art where she concentrated on Film/Video and graduated with an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. She has had her Film work shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and had one piece chosen for Sheets, Planes and Pulp, works on paper, a juried show held at the Evanston Art Center in September 2007.

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