Posted on
2024-08-19
The suggestion of total access and control found in drone footage is unnervingly irresistible as long as the implications back here on the ground are kept at bay. Before I can name and identify what I am looking at, and while the view is still a sandbox inviting hands-on meddling at no risk, I have one second before realizing that agendas other than mine have chosen the view. This is a short and blissful beat. As someone who often prefers their human closeness from afar, the moment is familiar.
In Formation looks at stills of contested geographies as source material, and the paintings start on the ground as drop cloths. Walking the landscape in bird’s eye perspective and transcribing features and landmarks in watery shorthand, I leave behind stains, dog hairs and other inadvertent DNA on the absorbent grounds, bits of non-diagrammatic evidence of my uneven focus and bodily limitations. In encounters with terrains that have seen several iterations of a conflict, I sometimes double the cloth and start the second painting from the stains of the first.
I trust speakers who for specificity’s sake choose made-up words and clunky syntax over eloquence.
Relatedly, I know the registers in my painting will feel dulled and inadequate over time and need continuity breaks and composite solutions to avoid it. Should my eyes get cocky about their judgment, then my nose, though less fluent, might make a sharper distinction, and later on my fingers, ear, tongue or foot keep me on my toes. As senses scan and thicken the source material into something embodied, I know my limits, and for a beat I am undefended. The moment is brief, and therefore tolerable.
Hanneline Røgeberg, July 2024
Opposite – Fingerspitzengefühl, 2023
Exhibition runs through to September 14th, 2024
Galleri Riis
Arbins gate 7
NO-0253 Oslo
Norway
galleririis.com
