One Image by Alina Vergnano:

Time has gone weird lately. Or at least, something has changed in the way I perceive its passage. Its velocity goes in waves: days go fast, and faster, and then suddenly they slow down, as if the hours were on the verge of stopping, only to start racing again. When I think about this elastic movement, my mind keeps returning to Henni Alftan and her series of diptychs, Déjà vu, and in particular to one: Haircut (Déjà vu).

Henni Alftan, Haircut (Déjà-vu), 2020, oil on canvas; 2 parts, Courtesy KARMA, New York. — Henni Alftan, *Haircut (Déjà-vu)*, 2020, oil on canvas; 2 parts, Courtesy KARMA, New York.

What draws my mind, and eyes, to this image, is its simultaneous depiction of time passing and time standing still. When I look at those scissors with a straight cascade of chestnut hair in between the shiny blades, I feel the stillness evoked by the precise brushstrokes, but also a soft pull to the moment coming next. It is not the tug of a far-removed future, but still, it is future. These two canvases bring me back to a haunting childhood question: what do we miss when our eyes blink? In my mind, the void left between the two images is filled by a sound, a snip. Something has unequivocally occurred; it is something subtle, yet radical. The scissors have closed and the hair has fallen, even if we missed the moment when it happened.

In my own work, time and change are central and, when I paint or draw, my main preoccupation is how to preserve their flowing nature. Things tend to happen fast and fluidly in my studio, and I normally respond more to images that are somehow similar to mine in nature. But the eerie, quasi-stillness in Alftan’s work is magnetic to me. It is like watching a very very thin still, distilling our days. It is disturbing, but I can’t stop looking.