Kunstkritikk

Written by Stian Gabrielsen

Published on Oct. 14, 2021

https://kunstkritikk.no/bildet-klarer-seg-selv/

Translated by ChatGPT

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The Image Takes Care of Itself

Jorunn Hancke Øgstad's paintings at Kosa in Oslo prove their own worth.

Contemporary society is preoccupied with two things: performance and insurance. Individuals and systems are expected to perform, and investments are to be secured. The quality sought by those with values to place can be summarized as fitness. Fitness demands adaptation to external demands, rather than adjusting the outside to the body's needs. The paintings of Jorunn Hancke Øgstad in the exhibition "Kermess" at Kosa in Oslo are marked by an expectation of performance similar to that imposed on the productive body.

Kosa and Hancke Øgstad's paintings complement each other. Both are, in a sense, optimal manifestations of their respective kinds: Hancke Øgstad's paintings through a striking visual efficiency, and Kosa as an exhibition space by welding artist-driven flexibility to authoritative architecture and programming.

Kosa is located in a spacious industrial pavilion in brick, built in 1876, idyllically situated in Maridalen in Oslo. Originally owned by the military, it was taken over by artist and architect Sverre and Vera Wyller in 2002 and converted into work and exhibition spaces. The interior is harmonious and stylish, with white, plastered brick walls, untreated veneer, and daylight streaming in from a row of windows ten meters above the floor. The art exhibited here must think it has died and gone to heaven. Since 2018, the pavilion has served as a display space for one exhibition per year. In addition, frequent exhibitions and projects are organized in a pavilion on the property named Jane. An idea of art's involvement in natural processes seems to be central. Hancke Øgstad's paintings do not show a clear thematic inclination in that direction, although they definitely live in their own way.

A narrow canvas is mounted from a beam in the ceiling, and a handful of canvases hang on the wall, but most are assembled in groups of three or two, placed at right angles to each other to form a kind of screen walls positioned against the wooden columns supporting a narrow loft. The paintings on the floor are just over two meters high, stretched on aluminum frames, forming a makeshift architecture that allows us to see the image from both sides. This presentation emphasizes two things: a superficiality that makes the canvas a wafer-thin membrane (in one place, the superficiality is dramatically heightened by two cracks in the canvas), and the object's relative independence from the surrounding space. These two qualities are connected with a painting that emphasizes it takes care of itself by standing upright with its own help and does not hold anything back from the gaze.

Color and motif make it seem like the paintings are painted to belong together, like diptychs and triptychs. Although the groups are characterized by a dominant base tone, they are contrasting. Hardly defined forms are played against layers with looser definition or bare canvas. A grid undulates in the joint between two canvases, testifying to both a flat organization of pictorial space and at the same time an animating force. The surface is not a herbarium that preserves the stroke; it energetically meanders and drips or radiates towards the edges from a center. The painting appears as an explosive event. But the suddenness is deceptive. The surfaces are carefully constructed. Primarily, fabric dye intended for batik is used, applied to horizontally moistened canvases and then treated with bleach.

The color seeps through, but the canvas still has a clearly defined front and back. Stencils are used to copy strokes that are applied using plastic wrap. In some places, the plastic remains on the canvas with traces of color.

The first thing that catches my eye is the alternation between the stroke that is "mounted in," which has more definition, and what is executed directly on the surface and bleeds into the fabric. Tracing where or how the strokes originated is no easy task.

Some have also been touched up after the transfer to the canvas. The point is probably not to emphasize the alternation between spontaneous and calculated gesturing but to somehow burst - frack - the stroke, extract everything it can give visually. This is connected to the superficiality, - how the entire work appears in the foreground or isthe foreground. There is no mysterious intention left in the depth of the image waiting to be conveyed. Everything is forced up, to the immediate limit against the gaze.

The stroke is what the painter works with. With the brushstroke she inherits the complexity that once existed in a relationship between the image and the references outside. Taking the picture down from the wall is symbolic, moving the reading of the gestures closer to the observer, overcoming a distance that was present before.

Despite enormous detail richness, there is not much noise in Hancke Øgstad's paintings. When the concentration on the smallest component is high enough, the painting loses its fat, the diffuse materiality that usually arises in parallel with the figure. All information in the image articulates itself on the frequency of the figure, lifts from the surface, and aggressively meets the eye. Hancke Øgstad's paintings are visual powerhouses. The design of the stroke testifies to an impatience for the eye's recognition that is descriptive of a relationship to art that takes communication out of the transaction between image and observer. In a sense, this shift entails a coarseness; the appealing in the image on its own requires immediate assurance to the viewer that it is worth the effort, and the image takes on a commercial allure that can feel overwhelming. At the same time, there is a freedom in this approach that is rarely acknowledged: no longer protected by the institution, art is also not obligated to declarations of belonging, and the encounter art facilitates can thus become more private and honest. Admittedly, art must then first overcome the shame of acting shamelessly.

The recent restoration of craftsmanship in art is often associated with a digitally produced longing for tactility. But this orientation towards materiality could also be attributed to an economic foresight on the part of the artist. A visual culture that copies and broadcasts everything creates a demand for objects that have unity in time and space. Aesthetic tactility becomes a medium for this irrepeatability. Hancke Øgstad's paintings borrow the hybridity and efficiency of digital visuality but do not overlook the importance of the substrate, the slow material procedures of painting (although she dampens their rhetorical presence). She ties a strategic visuality to the conservative advantage of the physical object, one could say. A good investment.