Ellen Altfest is an American painter with an obsessive penchant for realism. Her work's supreme level of detail evokes a microcosm of activity, with roads and highways represented by skimpy twigs and winding bristles of hair. Yet the work also feels very quiet and sterile in its straightforward rendering, not the least because these chaotic growths seem lacking in residents. Even her human subjects are passively objectified, displayed like a topographic map or simple anatomical study. What's interesting is that despite this, the works are hardly lacking in passion; they are a brilliant display of artistic fascination. Altfest patiently studies her subjects from life, working in seven hour increments over seven months before finishing a painting.

Gourds, 2006-2007

Though I doubt Altfest herself would agree that hyper realism is a dry approach to art-making, it's interesting to think of her work as commenting on the style's best implementation. The amount of work and skill she puts into each piece is extremely admirable, and focusing on "complexity" as a subject is very much in line with a realist's specialty. There is no narration or criticism of society, just a beautiful picture of an overlooked aspect of our world. It's comforting and mesmerizing in its straight-forwardness.

Tumbleweed, 2005

But Altfest does intend for us to see the value of her paintings beyond their technique, which I think she accomplishes by intimately cropping her works and allowing us to appreciate the un-idealized detail of their real-world counterparts. This is especially the case with her male figures, whose body hair and veiny genitalia remind us that humans are organic "things" not so different from plants.

"I think I learned to be an artist as a still life painter and then applied that language to the figure. Maybe the body is more understandable when it is broken down into knowable pieces. I also like that the parts of the body become their own things, separate from the person they belong to."

Torso, 2011