Kunstkritikk

Written by Simen Joachim Helsvig

Published on Sept 18. 2018

https://kunstkritikk.no/grat-ingen-tarer-for-maleriet/

Translated by ChatGPT

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Do not cry tears for the painting

One cannot find a better indication of the direction of post-digital painting than Jorunn Hancke Øgstad's exhibition "Crocodile Tears" at the Munch Museum in motion- Kunsthall Oslo.

For any artist working today, the flood of digital images is an unavoidable fact. Surprisingly, painting, in particular, has proven suitable for reflecting on these new visual and technological circumstances, simply because the flat surfaces of paintings resemble screens. However, few Norwegian painters engage with the digital image to the extent that Jorunn Hancke Øgstad does, who graduated from the Oslo Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. In 12 of the 14 paintings she presents in the exhibition "Crocodile Tears" at the Munch Museum in motion and Kunsthall Oslo's venue in Bjørvika, she has even borrowed the ultra-wide format of 21:9. The canvases are, however, hung vertically so that, with their dimensions of 70 x 158 cm, they also have proportions that are almost human.

Hancke Øgstad's paintings are constructed from overlapping layers of diverse strokes and markings, often using stencils and masking tape. In some places, she has scattered pigment powder over unprimed cotton canvas and sprayed it with water, causing the color to spread in small grainy terrazzo spots; in other places, she has gone the opposite way, allowing the pigment to dissolve in water puddles that have spread in flowing formations. Such procedural and non-gestural treatments of the canvas, where the color seems to unfold on its own, are disrupted by sharp stencil edges reminiscent of digital cut-and-paste contour lines. In some of the paintings, she has made it difficult to determine which of the layers is on top: In the painting "Infirmament" – which is atypically almost square – for example, four red and sharply defined lines lie alternately on the upper and lower sides of more fluid color fields, as if these spots and lines twisted and folded over each other in a virtual space. Such layered pictorial space seems entirely derived from a digital experience.

In other sections, she uses markings that refer to digital effects such as shading and color grading. In "Temps levé," a peach-pink plant-like figure hovers over a background color gradually transitioning from azure to turquoise. In another painting, "Smoothie Running," the pigment is drawn in swift curved strokes with a wide dry brush. The brushstrokes are applied at regular intervals across the entire canvas and resemble a pattern, as if the same stroke were repeated automatically using a "pattern fill" command in an image editing program.

The paintings thus become accumulations of seemingly spontaneous and seemingly prefabricated strokes and layers, without it being entirely clear to which category they belong. The dissolution of clear boundaries between authentic and copied, and artificial is a fundamental condition for the post-digital image. This is not a new situation for painting in itself. With his oversized and stylized dripping fresh brushstrokes in "Brushstroke" – a motif borrowed from a comic strip – Roy Lichtenstein already in 1965 mocked the idea of expressive strokes in the age of popular culture and reproduction. And in contemporary painters like Laura Owens, who emulates Photoshop tools that, in turn, emulate painterly effects, or Michael Manning, who produces his abstract paintings by "painting" with his fingers on touchscreens and then prints the results in 3D, the question of authenticity is irrelevant. Such post-digital painting is partly pre-programmed and partly improvised, partly data and partly traces of an artist subject.

Despite the apparent kinship with these practices, I do not feel that Hancke Øgstad is trying to comment on the status of painting under changed technological conditions. And although the exhibition title "Crocodile Tears" – shedding crocodile tears is, as known, a feigned emotional outburst – seems to cast doubt on the sincerity of the works, the paintings in my eyes are not really about authenticity. When Hancke Øgstad mimics digital effects in her handmade paintings, it is rather to build a complex visual architecture where the paintings can be read simultaneously as virtual spaces and material facts. This duality also involves scale. Over much of "How Grasp Green," there are ink doodles that look like enlarged scribbles but must have been drawn with large hand movements with an outstretched arm. Similarly, a continuous green-blue stroke is pulled out (probably with a needle) over the entire 164 cm wide "Untitled," an effort that must have involved the whole body. However, the gesture looks as though a smaller brushstroke has been scaled up digitally.

In "Crocodile Tears," Hancke Øgstad uses the entire repertoire of tools, techniques, and conventions from both abstract painting and digitally constructed and processed images. The color-saturated canvas surface gives a sense that one is facing a bottomless virtual space of floating and shifting layers. I cannot imagine a better indication of where painting can go in a post-digital reality. From such a starting point, painting still has a bright future.