What happens when portrait and still life exchange roles, and seeing and being seen are no longer fixed positions? Through reflection and reversal, familiar forms cease to function as distinct categories, instead sharing a mode of presence that extends across outward perception and inward states.
Eric Kaiser has been exhibiting since the early 2000s, with an international career spanning the United States, Switzerland, France and beyond. He holds a Master's degree in Arts and Cultures from the University of Lorraine, and further developed his practice through study at the Nancy School of Fine Art and extended periods working in Leipzig. In Nancy, he founded Les Ateliers des Sœurs Macarons (The Macaron Sisters' Studios) with a group of artists, and his work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the PyeongChang International Biennale in South Korea in 2015.
Reflecting Surfaces at the Phoenicia, curated by Charlene Vella, brings together work produced over his four-year period on the island, offering a condensed view of this chapter of his practice. The exhibition presents still lifes and portraiture as its two main subjects. While compositionally distinct, they are set in dialogue through their use of reflective surfaces and shifting perceptual effects.
The reversal between portraiture and still life was not preconceived, but emerged from an earlier exploration of reflection. In a previous exhibition, miniature figures were placed on mirrors, where their reflections produced subtle distortions. Encouraged to pursue this further on a smaller scale, Keiser began working from the curved metallic surface of a teapot, with forms becoming fragmented and unstable. From this point, the same interest in distortion began to extend toward faces.
The larger body of still life works uses the metallic surfaces of silver jugs to distort and intensify perceptions of otherwise mundane objects. Through their metallic properties, they absorb and interact with the surrounding environment, oscillating between object and context as seen in Réflexion 15 and 16. This fragmentation of shape and colour through light further animates surrounding miniatures and household items, shifting focus away from their literal, object-based forms and introducing a subtle narrative presence within the visual field as they dissolve into it.
Ultimately composed merely of paint, the artist achieves a striking three-dimensional effect through precise hues and obsessive attention to detail, noting: "I got really fascinated that I could render such dimensionality and an element of naturalness through the metallic properties of the object on a flat surface."
This process extends beyond the act of seeing alone to the conditions and environment of the work's production. Besides seeing inclusions of a new palette only in areas of reflection, in a number of them there is also a fragmented self-portrait of the artist caught in the act of painting, such as in Réflexion 33. This reflects an acknowledgement of its own making, marked by a subtle humour in its self-awareness, as the artist becomes visible within the act of depiction.
Additionally, he had also gotten bored with conventional props and this distorted insertion further brought an element of weirdness to the paintings. He embraced this not only in its strangeness but also because one would not know if they were not told, as he notes "Everything is really playful.
When I paint it is always playful."
Complementing this outward-facing view is the inclusion of works titled Weird Faces. Rather than addressing perception directly towards the viewer, they are psychologically driven, imbued with states of thought, withdrawal, and absorption. Close to familiarity yet shifted, their deliberately non-naturalistic flesh tones and divergent eye lines create a subtle tension, marked by an inward intensity without resolution.
This relationship between the two bodies of work is defined by a reversal of roles, in which portrait and still life exchange roles. The figures are rendered in a static condition, set against Maltese tile-inspired backdrops that flatten and isolate them, rendering them almost object-like in their singularity. The still life works, by contrast, engage their environment through material responsiveness and optical interaction, allowing for greater openness in perception. As the curator Vella reflects, "This reversal of the traditional functions of the portrait and the still life lends the whole series a high degree of conceptual precision: the painting does not seek to fix an identity, but to make perceptible a system of correspondences between beings, things and spaces."
The exhibition sustains a condition in which connection is both enacted and withheld, as relationships between motifs are continually formed yet never fully resolved. From this, meaning emerges through surface interactions rather than fixed correspondences, producing a state in which interpretation remains open, suspended between recognition and uncertainty.
Reflecting Surfaces, curated by Charlene Vella, is open to the public until 1 July 2026, at The Phoenicia, Palm Court Lounge