Erik Pape has painted the Paris Place Stalingrad for the past 20 years. Every year in September he takes photos and sketches in the square where the metro rides above ground over an arched railway viaduct on classic cast iron columns. In the series ‘Things that struck me’ he shifts the focus from the architecture of the railway viaduct to objects and locations that can be seen in and around the square: shopwindows, lunch in a bistro, mattresses of clochard and discarded furniture, books, vases and ceramics at the open air market and shop signs.
Erik Pape isolates these images and sets them against a coloured background, which puts the banal and prosaic of urban space in a new light and re-enchants it.
In this painting you see a yellow mustard bottle and the profile of a lady with wavy hair, an old advertisement for shampoo, which has been scratched into the paint with the back of the brush.