Tursic & Mille: Stains, Stars and other Catastrophes

The work of Ida Tursic (b. 1974) and Wilfried Mille (b. 1974) expresses a deep engagement with today's forms of image representation. Found in magazines and the enormous data pool of the internet, anonymous pictorial material is being transformed into the traditional domain of painting. Obscene pornography, film scenes of burning houses, landscapes as well as mere abstract and geometrical elements – the subjects depicted illustrate the common overload of image production circulating through present media. Often alienated by overlapping layers of paint or interrupted by various patterns these paintings deal with the manipulation, re-utilisation and disappearance of images.

‘Something in the painting of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille makes us beautiful, and turns us into worthy onlookers. Herein lies the 'intangible' part of the oeuvre of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille. It is in the nature and making of this relationship which links us to it. And if this painting leaves plenty of room for tangible things, but does not assign them any place in particular, this is because its project is elsewhere: in the on-going quest for ways of expressing this intangible part which alone sets works of art apart from ordinary things, and makes a distinction between pictures and paintings.’

É. Troncy, ‘This Painting’ in Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille. Decade, Les presses du réel, 2011