Via Norske Fjell, del 1

Via Norwegian Mountains, part 1.

The exhibition was shown at Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst / Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art, 2019.

Imagine that you look through a photo album from your childhood. You flip through the pages and get transported back to places that evoke a distinct smell and sound, and you remember voices, people and surroundings. It´s not entirely clear to you whether the memories stem from all the times you´ve looked through the album, or if they go back to the original situations in which the photos were taken.

It´s been a long time, and you weren’t very old. 

When I look out across the fjord at Stegastein; a dramatic viewpoint along The Norwegian Scenic Routes on the west coast ; am I looking at an echo of images from national tv-shows, from landscapes I’ve seen in museums, in history books and in tourist brochures - or do I see nature as it is?

And what does that mean -to see nature as it is?

Via Norwegian Mountains, is a series of exhibitions in which I study how I as an artist and an individual, can translate my experience of the Norwegian nature into paintings.

During a work stay in Iceland a few years ago, I was faced with a landscape so utterly complex and overwhelming that I lost my motivation to paint it. What was the point, when I could just walk around inside it? The experience of the so-called romantic sublime* lead to a sort of painting crisis, which forced me to accept the disappointing fact that a painting can never convey my personal experience of nature.

The painters of landscapes in the 20th century must have been as overwhelmed with the Norwegian wilderness as I was with the Icelandic nature, yet they threw themselves directly at the challenge of capturing a new, uncanny and unfathomable place.

The painters traveled via Norwegian mountains alongside pioneer climbers and landsurveyors, for miles and miles inland, high up over mountainpasses and eventually down into the fjords and onto their boats. The photographic camera had not yet found its way to the mountains, and the artists must have looked really hard with their minds in order to paint such convincing and life like representations. The paintings were not made on the spot, but were produced in studios abroad, from sketches and recollections.

The audience were urban dwellers of the cities and the continent. They also, got presented with something they had never seen before. An untouched land far beyond the veil of the city smog. The sublime experience of a new land continued into the gallery, and thus strengthened the national identity of a recently independent country. Imagery, music, folktales and language were used to build the new nation out of the old. The romantic representation of nature was etched into the norwegian mind, and still defines the collective idea of what Norway looks like to this day...

*) The romantic sublime refers to a realm of experience beyond the measurable that is beyond rational thought, and that arises chiefly from the terrors and awe-inspiring natural phenomena (Greenblatt, Stephen, Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006).