Underskog

UKS is proud to present a new exhibition by Jorunn Hancke Øgstad:

Painting from Oblivion

“Stupid as a painter” is a famous French proverb. It was a favorite of Marcel Duchamp, for whom it expressed the dead end that a mimetic artistic practice represented, an art that pleased the eye, not the intellect. But one could read it also to indicate less the literal stupidity of the painter, but the very reason he or she picks up a brush and paints. The tool in question is not used to articulate in words, but to create a visual language, to examine and structure the world. That is why painting is a rather heavy discipline, weighed down by it‘s own history. Jorunn Hancke Øgstad takes on this quality of painting in her own way, reinterpreting its history as an empowering back catalogue of painterly possibilities, while at the same time maintaining independence: „Being a painter today, means trying to forget.“ Her paintings are adventurous, if modestly domestic in proportion and scale. Often they are stripped to their bare essentials, with only a few characteristic gestures, that appear like the characters or props, that appear misplaced in a Beckettian play, stuck in the gaps and holes of communicating with a language that is incapable of covering everything. Some of these marks, squiggles, smears and stains are so awkward, they could be read as haphazard, arbitrary or jokes. Their coming out of the blue challenges the viewer, to closer inspection and reflection, upon which the works develop narratives of layers of paint, conveying its own history, of playfully pitching a form against another, a brush mark in an unexpected color, counteracted with a rigorous gesture, and on and on. From the first brushstroke, memory comes into play, and in a dialogue of her mind and her hand, one thing leads to another. This can be supportive, contradictory, wiping or blotting out the first line, adding and subtracting, until the painting reaches the finish line. It can be a tedious process, with the paintings occupying the studio and nothing happening for weeks months, maybe years, while the artist, like a chess player, contemplates her next move. This is how the work continues to grow, to gel, to ferment, in steps that oscillate between the meditative and the speculative. Therefore every piece is individual, following internal rules, created as a painterly process of selection and association. These works adhere to no opaque system, nor are they hermetic. Even if the artist refuses to present a recognizable image, let alone decipherable meaning, or some heroic truth. Nor is she riding along the lines of Derrida’s concept of deconstruction, that implicitly questions the validity of the underlying structures upon which other meanings lie. Although these ideas clearly inform her paintings, they present most of all a forms of visual poems, compositions, that make use of the key elements of the language of painting, and subject them to very basic questions. How do colors and forms produce a conclusive entity? What is depth in a work of abstract art? How to preserve a sense of humor? At a time where the art world appears to always be fixated on the next big thing, her work seems to be untimely and homeless. Jorunn Hancke Øgstad goes back to the point, where painting is a practice of dealing with the world and the primordial soup of paints on the palette: a chaotic situation, where everything is possible. Her exploration of the boundaries of painting, that others have hurriedly left behind, taking them for granted, places her work in the tradition of artists such as Giorgio Morandi or Raoul de Keyser. But then tradition is exactly what she is probably not very interested in. Nor stupidity.

-Andreas Schlaegel