My work begins intuitively and unfolds through a process of refinement. Using automatic drawing as a starting point, I translate emergent imagery into paintings that emphasize containment, balance, and material presence. The resulting works hold ambiguity rather than narrative, inviting reflection rather than interpretation.
Style & Technique
Noëmi Manser’s work engages with the relationship between intuitive image-making and deliberate painterly construction. Her practice explores how contrast, light and shadow, density and openness, control and spontaneity, can be held within a single visual field.
Manser primarily works in oil on canvas, drawn to the medium for its capacity for depth, luminosity, and gradual transformation. Through glazing and layered application, she builds complex surfaces where figures and environments emerge slowly over time. Light plays a central role in this process, not as an effect, but as a structuring element that gives the work spatial and emotional density.
Her visual language combines figurative elements with surrealist distortion, using symbolism and repetition to suggest states of transition and ambiguity. Rather than illustrating specific narratives, the paintings remain open-ended, allowing viewers to engage with the work through their own associations. The result is imagery that feels suspended between precision and fluidity, offering a space where emotional intensity is contained through form.
Connecting Brains
Connecting Brains is a distinct body of work within Noëmi Manser’s practice, centered on the repeated depiction of faces. Developed as a serial exploration, the project uses variation, repetition, and gesture to investigate presence, difference, and collective identity.
Working ambidextrously, Manser introduces shifts in pressure, rhythm, and symmetry, allowing each face to emerge with its own subtle character while remaining part of a larger visual system. The use of repetition emphasizes both sameness and difference, creating a dynamic tension between individuality and collectivity.
While her broader studio practice is rooted in intuitive research and exploratory drawing, Connecting Brains functions as a focused, outward-facing series. Its clarity and consistency allow the work to operate across contexts, including public space, where the faces interact directly with architectural surfaces and viewers’ daily movement.
This separation between private research and public series enables Manser to work intuitively while presenting a coherent and legible body of work that stands independently of its origins.