Woman with Dog

The paintings of Brazilian artist Eduardo Berliner are characterised by a sense of delirium and the uncanny. Mixing everyday realities with sentimentality, memory and nostalgia, Berliner renders the familiar strange in his dreamlike compositions. Executed in 2009, Woman With Dog presents a portrait of a seated woman cradling a French bulldog. The affectionate embrace has become awkward: the dog’s floundering stance has entirely obscured the woman’s face from view, revealing instead the elongated, pink and speckled underbelly of her pet. Its eye gleams an unnatural blue as if caught by the flash of a camera. The dog’s flailing paws are echoed in the shadow that falls across the wall, and the thin straps of the woman’s pale yellow dress slip lightly off her shoulder. The unusual, up-close angle of the painting further intensifies the scene: as if positioned within the pictorial space itself, the viewer is situated uncomfortably close to the woman’s fleshy knees as she reclines deeply into her large, striped armchair. Berliner always searches for elements of improvisation in his work, allowing his scenes to unfold organically without the absolute limitations of the predefined. Fusing moments of the quotidian with the uninhibited freedom of the unconscious mind, his pensive works become unsettling mediations on what it is to perceive reality.