(...) Semen is both a painter and a draftswoman. Thus, her graphic works on paper repeatedly incorporate two-dimensional, painterly elements. A strongly graphic line in turn marks her oil paintings. (...)
It is a jungle world in which Ellen Semen sets her protagonists. In lush, bright shades of green, she creates a fantastic rainforest backdrop against which humans and animals sometimes appear modest. Semen often integrates figures she discovers in magazines into her typical combination pictures. She then places these figures in a completely new context alongside botanical representations and free painterly compositions. In doing so, she succeeds in creating completely new units from the set pieces. The viewer's perception is then put to the test, as what appears on the surface to be an idyllic paradise is almost imperceptibly undermined. On closer inspection, many scenes that initially appear harmonious and peaceful suddenly turn harsh and violent. Militias lurk in the bushes and even cute koalas wield machine guns. Ellen Semen's paintings, which at first glance appear naïve, suddenly tell of the horrors of this world. Even if it is an artificial fantasy world that Semen creates, it also refers in a frighteningly direct way to real world events that actually exist.
Ellen Semen's motifs and painting style are reminiscent of the famous French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), who simplified and idealized his pictures. As can be observed in Ellen Semen's work, individual pictorial elements in Rousseau's work repeatedly come together in a completely surprising and unconnected manner. The same applies to the conception of pictorial planes: In Rousseau's work, as in Semen's, the foreground and background are characterized by a consistent sharpness. Clear contours, complementary color contrasts and the manifold gradations of green tones are further similarities. There is, however, one striking difference between the classical modernist painter and the contemporary artist Ellen Semen. It is the aforementioned conception of reality: whereas Rousseau created fictions that bordered on the surreal, Semen's work ultimately asserts the harsh, absolute reality of human civilization despite the charming painting and the fictitiously combined scenes. Dreamscapes become the scenes of nightmares from which there is no awakening in reality."