The young artist Femmy Otten is in her making of a pictorial world of her own. Deliberately, she seems to bypass the so called contemporary set of strategies and image-making. Instead, she is attracted to ways of representing that belongs to other cultures, such as the Persian miniature, or other times , back to the mummy- portraits from the first century b.c. Her protagonists are centaurs just as often as young women. They seem to be involved in complex emotional , sometimes erotic , situations. Or they are moving around in a never- ending daydream.
Femmy Otten's world is beautiful, clear, but also filled with visual puns, almost as in some medieval illumination. She is keeping up her integrity, as if she would know that in some hundred years from now, people wouldn't be too fussy about the necessity to stick only to your own time.
The philosopher Henri Bergson is writing about La duree. It is a kind of flow, in which we are not only creating memories through experience and recollection, but also where we could use the precise instrument of intuition, for being able to bypass the purely intellectual. In his book Bergsonism, Gilles Deleuze describes how intuition is working according to Bergson.
" We tend to think in terms of more and less, that is to see differences in degree where there are differences in kind. We can only react against this intellectual tendency by bringing to life, again in the intelligence,another tendency, which is critical. But where, precisely, does this second tendency come from? Only intuition can produce and activate it, because it rediscovers differences in kind beneath the differences in degree, and conveys to the intelligence the criteria that enable it to distinguish between true and false problems" ( p 21).
Femmy Otten is putting her intuition into play. It makes it possible for her to distinguish between true and false problems in her own making of art. That is why her work seems so resolved, and so self- evident, although it consists of elements that you normally would hesitate from bringing together.
She is making art. It means that she is acting in a field , where a gesture is there to last. Where time has lost its relevance.
Gertrud Sandqvist