Birgir Andrésson What is the relationship between visual and verbal language, between seeing and thinking? How is the one influenced or formed if one lacks the other or only uses it in a limited way? Can we ever get past the categories that shape our thinking or the cultural heritage that determines who we are? These are questions that are central to Birgir Andrésson's artistic oeuvre. Both his parents are blind, and together with them he grew up in a home for the visually impaired, which for him constantly actualized the issue of how different forms of communication function and which factors are crucial to our interpretations of reality. He starts with the view that the meaning in pictures and symbols is largely context-dependent and is based on a consensus formed by social conditions. With this point of departure he has created conceptual paintings and objects where colour, form, text and content become interpretations and bearers of philosophical, social and psychological issues, and of course also with art historical implications. Andrésson investigates the conventions which above all control the visual language, and brings out certain aspects which he later formalizes and refines, so that he can question them at both the general and personal level. In a series of portraits on a monochrome background Andrésson uses text alone; he describes the subject for us and gives a thumbnail sketch of features like hair colour and facial shape, but also notes how he does not wear socks inside his shoes, or has a fine singing voice. What is it we are actually told? Is it about the subject of the portrait or our own seeing? Perhaps about the difficulty, or quite simply the impossibility, of getting beyond the standard categorizations. All paintings contain information about the colours used. He employs the designation 'Icelandic' about the colours. This can be understood to mean that all the colours Birgir Andrésson chooses become Icelandic, since he himself is formed by the Icelandic culture. The formal and coloristic choices the artist makes are controlled by emotional or intellectual deliberations, but are always part of his specific cultural identity. - Magnus Jensner -  Birgir Andrésson: Portrait #9 Karin Granqvist Karin Granqvist paints in ways that do not talk to us through a rational coding system or directly interpretable narratives. They have their own quite precise language; not realistically figurative, yet not abstract either (in the sense of pictures that take their point of departure in a model or example); rather a type of concrete painting, to use an established term from art history. There is thus no formal starting-point; the pictures come directly from within the artist herself and we observers are thus permitted to share an absolutely unique world of form, relieved of any rigidly defined burden of meaning. Karin Granqvist's painting could conceivably be related to the imagery of post-war American painting, but she herself mentions no such influences, and perhaps this is not so interesting anyway, since she undoubtedly presents an idiom that is all her own. The technique is traditional, oil on canvas, and the canvases are in a generously augmented medium format with a leaning towards "large scale painting". Large areas of the white canvas are left thoroughly blank and untouched. The colour is applied with direct, instantaneous precision, with no room for concealing overpainting or retouching of small errors. The brushstroke is kept quite intact in certain sections, and in others different colours and formal expressions vie for one and the same space. One could claim that her painterly gesture oscillates between carefully considered calligraphy and apparently uncontrolled scrawls. Overall, the treatment of colour gives the pictures a beautifully clear mood. It is distinct, poetic and humorous all at once. In our high-technology, information-saturated, fast-consuming age, Karin Granqvist insists stubbornly on something as anachronistic as painting; and moreover on a non-narrative type of painting where, like the ancient Chinese calligraphy masters, she attempts to capture the possibility of expressing sound and poetry through a non-language; as an exact emotional meaning. Not least the play of colours has a quite crucial role; as the artist herself puts it: "Colour does not displace any reality. Colour is reality. And tolerates all other realities." - Ĺsa Nacking -  Karin Granqvist Charlotte Gyllenhammar Charlotte Gyllenhammar holds up an image of something inscrutable in her works: it is the image of a mental or spiritual state. It is not a metaphor for a more general issue, but a more specific emotion that demands the observer's undivided attention. It is hard to say exactly what it is, which is probably one of the reasons why the images are so fascinating and create a growing feeling of curiosity. Gyllenhammar trained as a painter and has gradually worked her way out into the surrounding space to conquer the third dimension for her images; but also in order to forge a more physical link with the spectator. In addition she has turned more and more to film and video, where she moves in the borderline area between moving images and photography, between video and painting. The films can be described as moving stills, but it is precisely the minimal movements that make the images so ambivalent, so charged. In the presentation of the works an account is given of mirrors, projectors and film screens, and these become an integrated and important part of the aesthetics. Gyllenhammar creates rigorous, very well composed pictures of situations that leave you with a sneaking feeling of unease. At the Rooseum we are showing the work Fall from 1999, which consists of two moving images: projected on a screen on the ceiling is the image of a woman who hangs upside-down. The whole picture is filled by her clothes, as if she is caught in this white sea of dresses, as if she is being swallowed up by all the material. On the other screen, placed immediately above the floor, we see two boys lying very quietly beside each other. We see when they turn and we hear the faint sound from the sheets. It is expressively subtle, there is a sense of comfort and calm and a slight melancholy when the people depicted move quietly in the dark exhibition room. At the same time one feels as an observer a suppressed power; what we see can be regarded as the lull before the storm or perhaps something that will never achieve its discharge or resolution, a kind of nightmare state: this is how these people always look, this is their permanent state. - Magnus Jensner -  Charlotte Gyllenhammar: Fall Henrik Plenge Jakobsen Henrik Plenge Jakobsen has been provoking the general and art public throughout the nineties by staging threatening, unpleasant happenings - most recently with his colleague Jes Brinck when they split apart a brand new Jaguar at an exhibition in Aarhus. He uses chaos and destruction as an image of an emotion, or as a metaphor for the way he experiences reality and the forces that control it, while at the same time the works have a tangible physical presence. For the observer of these open works of art, not being able to distinguish quite clearly between artwork and reality, where the one or the other begins or ends, can be perceived as something threatening or frightening. Instead of depicting events he reproduces them in the gallery, museum or, as with the work Burn out from 1994, on a square in the middle of Copenhagen. Here, art is not an aesthetic object one can observe at a safe distance in a well defined museum environment, but something that challenges the order or structure of the reality that directly surrounds us. Jakobsen singles out sanctioned social forms and uses his works to question what it is that makes one thing legal and another illegal among various actions where the consequences can be very similar. That is one way of understanding the laughing-gas that has formed part of Jakobsen's works since 1994, when he exhibited the work Atomic Electronic Ecstatic. The laughing-gas functions in different ways: relationally as a kind of social catalyst by making the visitors communicate directly with one another, with the work and with the artist; and as a way of quite specifically offering the type of elevated experience that art is expected to be able to communicate. In addition it becomes a metaphor for the casual highs and short-term commercial gratification that determine the forms of much in the development of today's society. In the model Villa Spies, from the exhibition Travel King last year, he placed laughing-gas tubes and villa executed in the same size alongside each other, which gives the spectacular summer residence and the tubes a content as interchangeable pleasures. - Magnus Jensner -  Henrik Plenge Jakobsen: Terminator Matts Leiderstam In many of his works Matts Leiderstam has used the "ideal landscape" as an image of nature, with a point of departure in the ways in which it was depicted by artists like Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain during the latter part of the sixteenth century, and the way these pictures have contributed to the growth of modern parks, the oases we regard today as a natural part of our cities. The park as a venue for "gay cruising" - an often concealed or secret meeting-place for homosexual men - has also interested him in a large number of works in recent years. In Leiderstam's pictures and models the park becomes a place where expectations result in both pleasure and pain, beauty and violence, while at the same time in these park paintings he opens the door to a dialogue with well known masterpieces from history. In the gay culture, as in the history of art, there is a set of codes and symbols that are not always accessible to the uninitiated. This is something Leiderstam explores and later exploits in a very interesting way in his reproductions of known and unknown historical paintings, into which he slowly works his way through his in-depth studies. He takes the history of art as his starting-point, partly for the sake of the purely technical development and exploration of his own craftsmanship; but above all as a way of approaching some new aspect he has discovered - something the standard interpretations may have missed or quite simply refuse to see in these carefully selected pictures. We find an urge in Leiderstam's work to show the observer something different, an overlooked or hidden side of the events which opens up avenues for new interpretations. He grasps hold of something in the picture which he then comments on or changes; or perhaps the content of the whole picture is commented on and quite physically installed in the exhibition space. Through his interpretations, reproductions and installations he invites the observer to interact directly with the artwork's familiar and openly declared intentions, but also with the concealed, underlying motif which it takes us slightly longer to discover. - Magnus Jensner -  Matts Leiderstam: The Painters Studio Rita Lundqvist We meet Rita Lundqvist's pictorial world in small, figurative oil paintings executed in minute detail on panels. The paintings consist of a row of free-standing narratives where the motif is almost always a girlish woman dres-sed in a frock and placed in various situations. Often shown frontally, with a slightly stiff, paper-doll-like look, these women give a mute yet alert and strikingly present impression. Without the accentuated girlishness, one could have seen them as direct self-portraits of the artist. But the interest goes beyond the purely personal and the motif rather gives form to more universally human feelings and behaviour, such as the need for control and the fear of the unknown. In this well-ordered universe the challenges and risks of life are minimized to something tangible and manageable, in an attempt at protection against the painful and the evil: the excursions that are made in quick succession are in impeccable clothing and with exemplary behaviour-there are no frivolous, amorous escapades, and if the female protagonist does not appear alone, she is together with a sister, a twin or a twin soul, identical to the point of indistinguishability. It is asif these figures have had a strict upbringing or are in some way in a mental prison, and even when they jump or fall, they seem rehearsed. All emotions must be suppressed explosions, kept effectively in rein beneath the buttoned-up jackets. Yet it is not only the girlish character, but the whole world of motifs as such seems arranged and symmetrically well balanced. With roots in a profound understanding of human insecurity, but also with an affirmation of alert curiosity and the keen joy of discovery, Rita Lundqvist carries out a systematic exploration of the various joys and trivialities of life. While the various protagonists of the stories seem positive in their capacity to find a balanced standpoint, completely on their own terms, these symbolically charged pictures almost have the effect of a spell against everything unknown and dangerous, whether physical, relational or social. - Ĺsa Nacking -  Rita Lundqvist: Fall Hans Hamid Rasmussen Hans Hamid has asked me to summarize our conversations over a period of six years. They have often centered on body, language, feminism, psychoanalysis, and art. A topic frequently re-opened, like a wound, has been woman as metaphor and, at the same time, as something that resists language, making it equivocal. Her anatomy invites the drawing of landscapes containing cavities, passages, secret chambers a subterranean world as tempting as it is uncontrollable. During the centuries of Romanticism and the rise of science the woman more effectively than before disappeared from the public arena, losing her right to speak of herself, or of the world being robbed of her language to such a degree that she might be perceived as one giant egg cell, defined solely in terms of her sex. Rather than having a language she became part of the language, as the ultimate metaphor, as an image. She could not, however, be completely incorporated into the language, due not primarily to her actual existence but more to her continuing participation in a separate economy, the economy of sexuality and desire. When one, or man, speaks of the woman as someone who resists the language, it is this final remnant of activity that becomes so threatening as to invite her very annihilation, in order for her to become fully incorporated into the language and turned into the privileged metaphor. Could this be the reason why female sexuality is regarded as unclean, by its insistence that she is still alive and neither can nor will be an ideal, but instead a participant? The hysterics of the late eighteen hundreds, Charcot's comediennes, were described as women who rebelled against their proper role by transforming their bodies into a language, their sexuality into a message. The solution for the hysteric was for her to be reasoned with, which was the foundation of psychoanalysis, the talking cure that Freud and Breuer had to modify considerably for it to give lasting results. Only by actually mastering her own language did the woman get rid of her symptoms. Reasoning with the woman would inevitably cause a relapse on her part. She had to be capable of speaking on her own behalf. A field that avoided the speaking woman was the visual arts. Here she was seen as both image and matter, in short the state that patriarchal society had less successfully striven to achieve in the area of language. Only in light of this cultural phenomenon does it seem at all comprehensible that it was not until the end of the 1980s that women achieved wide participation in the visual arts. Ever since the time of the young Romantics art had indeed been identified as an erotic function, to such an extent that the aging Renoir responded to the question of how he could paint with fingers distorted by arthritis by declaring: "I paint with my prick." With the woman as a model and the canvas or clay as inert matter, the dream of taming the woman by pacifying her sexuality, her body, could be realized. The absence of menstruating women and the paucity of pregnant women was no accident, even if the male body can be seen in all situations, especially in battle, the occasion which in its dramatic threatening of bodily integrity most resembles pregnancy and delivery. Interestingly enough, within visual culture the word is removed not only from women but also from the (male) artists, virtually in the bargain. Visual culture, in which the woman is so prevalent as an object, and which is as frequently defined in terms of the active sexuality of the artist, would have turned explosive if the language were also present, in a union of sexuality and speech. The male counterpart to hysteria, hypochondria, is, in fact, considered to be especially common among artists. Women now speak, and they are sexually active at will. Woman as object has nearly disappeared from the visual arts; and, predictably enough, artists write and speak, as the visual arts are indeed becoming saturated with language. It will be interesting to observe the changes in the attitude of the young male artist to language and sex. Is he now permitted to display his passivity, his desire for silence, his physical being, and his identification with landscapes of stormy seas, wild mountains, and tall pines - his longing to explore secret chambers of his own? - Gertrud Sandqvist -  Hans Hamid Rasmussen: 7 month foetus Maaria Wirkkala Maaria Wirkkala is creating a work in the upper gallery of the Rooseum for this exhibition. She blows coal dust directly at the wall and forms a rectangle, a dark film screen. The work, which she calls Dream Screen, becomes a projection surface for dreams. Another work in the same space has the title Dream Screen (Prime Time). In a moving image in real time projected on a stone mounted on the wall one discovers and explores the back of one's own neck, a part of the body one normally never sees. The work creates a strange experience, a doubling of the self, and title and film image work together with references to TV and a well known picture by Magritte to evoke thoughts about seeing, projection and reflection. Both works, to varying degrees, exhibit the links found in Wirkkala's works with Surrealism and with the attraction of the Surrealist artists to the world of dreams. Both works evince her ability to show what normally escapes us. She also presents us with images of our dreams and their role in the discovery of hidden aspects or possibilities in our everyday surroundings. Finding surfaces and spaces that can be used to express something overlooked, and thus giving it new life and new potential for meaning, permeates her artistic output. She fills empty space and shows that emptiness too has an important place in our perception of the spatial. Often with quite unassuming resources, Wirkkala succeeds in transforming the character of the space, giving our immediate surroundings a different content or coaxing a new emotion from the observer. We pause before the new, what the artist has added, and our reactions also change our interactions with other people. Wirkkala changes the world by using limited resources to communicate with us and showing us something hitherto unnoticed in the space we frequent daily. By adding simple details, material or objects she conveys thoughts, memories and dreams. She speaks to us through low-key, fine-tuned channels, through displacements that open up new possibilities. Her sensitive reconfigurations make her a poet of the everyday object and space. - Magnus Jensner -  Maaria Wirkkala: Blind Wall |
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS | UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS | PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS
ABOUT ROOSEUM | EVENTS | BOOKSHOP | GUESTBOOK | LINKS | INDEX
Copyright 1998 the Rooseum, the artists,the authors & the photographers.
All rights reserved. No portion of this document may be reproduced,
copied or in anyway reused without permission from Rooseum.