The dialogue between cinema and painting is a longstanding one. The influence of Edward Hopper, for instance, can be recognised in the conception of atmosphere and light in the works of directors such as Wim Wenders, David Lynch, and Sam Mendes. The architectural solitude of Paris, Texas (1984), the quiet room of Twin Peaks, the geometric suburbia of American Beauty (1999) or A Serious Man (2009) are constructions that echo Hopper’s pictorial visuality. Other painters have also left their mark on cinema: the scene of Monica Vitti on the lawn in Antonioni’s La Notte (1961) clearly recalls Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948). Caravaggio’s dramatic lighting finds expression in sequences of The Godfather (1972); Vermeer’s serene geometry seems to inspire the use of light in Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988).

There is, however, a movement in the opposite direction as well. Since Henri Darger, who between the 1910s and 1970s created his Vivian Girls — a body of interconnected images and narratives, many accompanied by thousands of handwritten pages — painting has also operated as a language for fictional construction.

Fictional Matter: The Infiltration of Languages

Artists such as Paula Rego, Neo Rauch, and Alex Gross, each in their own way, project fragments of possible plots onto their canvases, with characters, atmospheres, and tensions that suggest dramatic arcs, even when not explicitly narrated.

It is within this territory of intersections that Anuk Vardan positions her research. In Infiltration, the artist embarks on an investigation of cinematic imagery. She appropriates scenes and stills, transposing them into the materiality of oil painting. Yet a displacement occurs: elements are added, others suppressed, and the composition is restructured. The image is not quoted — it is transformed. The time of painting reconfigures the time of the scene.

The fictional narrative that emerges from this operation is not directly inscribed on the canvas, but inhabits it — and is symbolically present in the newspaper on the table, which is also part of the painting. Anuk fabricates this newspaper as a three-dimensional object, in which one may read an interview with the central character: an engineer, father of a family, resident of the iconic Estrela do Sul Condominium. The interview is a literary creation, written by Anuk as part of the work’s universe, in which the character narrates, from his perspective, the crisis unfolding in the building. The narrative is plausible, yet laden with elements that oscillate between the absurd and the conceivable. Men who roam wearing technological helmets to avoid social interaction are among the figures populating this scenario. There is a certain madness, treated with naturalness, which resonates with the codes of science fiction — and yet, it seems to speak directly to our present reality.

In Anuk’s work, writing also takes part in the dialogue between painting and cinema. The script — the initial cog in the cinematic mechanism — often transitions from set to bookshelf, published as literary text. It is in this space that Anuk approaches the written word, with both technical knowledge and emotional familiarity. Accustomed to reading screenplays — her library includes scripts by Bergman, Tarantino, and Mario Peixoto — and always attentive to narrative construction, she studies their forms, visual stitching, and internal rhythms. It is this acute awareness of narrative structure within the expanded field of the image that leads her to write the long fictional interview for Infiltration, creating a fiction that both nourishes and is nourished by the painting.

The result is a figurative work, asserting itself through the clarity of its forms, yet constantly challenging the logic of the real through the insertion of elements of strangeness and displacement. Playful aspects with ambiguous contours permeate the scenes — as though something were always about to happen, or collapse. The objects, the newspaper, the interview, the architecture, the bubble-people: all suggest that the image belongs to something larger, a narrative in motion. These elements do not function as props; they act as symbolic clues to a world that pulses beyond the frame of the painting. As Bruegel and Bosch did in their works, Anuk also sows signs that summon the gaze to decipher — fragments of a narrative code that resists immediate reading. Infiltration begins in cinema, takes form in painting, and returns — through narrative threads — to the territory of fiction, blending times, languages, and media. It is a circuit. The image here is a living instance — permeable to time, fiction, and language, and continually reinscribed across each medium.