"WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?" A TA...
"WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?" a talk between Trine Boesen and Uta GrosenickUG: When I first saw your work in 2004, I was very fascinated by your paintings that seem to pull the viewer into a tunnel of fiction and fairy tale. At the same time they reminded me - which is maybe not very polite to mention - of two other painters, who don’t have very much in common with each other and probably not with you as well:
The German Franz Ackermann and the American Lisa Ruyter. While Ackermann’s works combine the external reality of a location with the artist's subjective feelings about different cities around the world, which he refers to as "mental maps," Ruyter’s works stand in the tradition of Pop Art and focus on everyday scenes painted in bright unreal colours. What is your approach to your work?
TB: My approach? I look at the stuff that is in the world that I’m placed in. Then I try to transform what surrounds me onto the canvas, and like Ackermann, with subjective interpretations. I try to make images of us and of the time we live in. I focus on a reality that might not look very real, for example by mixing between different art directions.
UG: Ackermann makes sketches in form of a diary during he travels and later transforms them into huge paintings. Ruyter takes photo snapshots herself and paints her canvases after them. How do you proceed?
TB: Mostly I use the photos as sketches. It could be my own private shots of things, buildings, parties, travelling, persons that I know or images found on the internet, or from commercials, magazines, books and so on. I collect images from anything and from anywhere. The images of course have to give me some kind of meaning, symbolic, visual, graphic etc., anything that makes my inner film running. When I start a painting I usually have a main idea and from there it develops from out of all the material that I have collected. I transform the photos into drawings and then project these drawings on the canvas, where I play with them and give every single motive/object a whole new order.
UG: Can you describe the “time we live in”? How do you change this "time" in your paintings? Are they showing a more colourful life than we live in or do they transmit a more menacing environment than we experience in reality.
TB: I think we live in a time where almost everything is possible, reality is far beyond what one could ever imagine, the information flow and mass communication is heavier than ever and we are very "global". Our time is very dynamic, very planned, very ambitious, very chaotic and very much filled with contrasts. The polarity is pronounced in both a positive and a negative way. I don’t try to change "our time" in my paintings, I try to capture it. Sometimes life seems sugar coated, but it doesn’t mean that it tastes good every time you take a bite. That might be the menacing in some of my work. My use of colours is a tool to express certain energy, feeling, state of mind or atmosphere. Together with the all figurations they seem very insisting/powerful. It is a way to bring the common sense into another light and to reflect this world. I have just turned up the volume.
UG: In a short text that you wrote in 2003, you say: “There is always more than one reality.” Do you try to bring these different realities together?
TB: Yes, I work with the idea of duplicity of life. I question how we perceive the world, we live in and how we make it make sense. I think reality has more than one level. A dream is just as real as the place I buy groceries in. We have a physical world we all agree on and then we have a mental world that’s very individual. I try to bring these things together, side by side. That is also why I use figurations that we know. It is not hard to get the viewer to believe that the outline of a car or a can is a car or can. We know the symbol/idea of “car” and “can” and understand it very fast, but when you put the car inside the empty can it’s a whole different story. Then you don’t know, if the car is very small or the can very big and what does it mean? Everything I use in my painting is culture or nature taken from physical life, things everybody more or less known and then I twist it in the connection with other objects/figurations. My universe always has a lot of different stories, objects, symbols and so on that point in more directions, but still make the whole picture come together.
I work with the idea that everything happens simultaneous. Like in the movie “Short Cuts”, where people are running in and out of each other’s life without knowing it and how one fortuitous action can start an avalanche that changes life for everybody in different ways and no one know the connection. This is one way to explain the parallelism that I try to bring into my work.
The white drawings are often very concrete, representing the “real world”? Or is it the surroundings that are more real? I think that my work is some kind of mirror for the existing society as well as psychological reflections.
UG: What do you tell the viewer of your paintings? Should he dive into his fantasy world and forget about the daily small and big problems. How does someone get the colourful beauty that you create into his boring everyday life?
TB: I see my work as a hybrid of everything around me and inside me. Thereby it is also a hybrid of everyday life or at least my reflection/impression. Of course I know this is not what everyday life looks like when you look out of the window, but if you turn your eyes towards your self you might recognize some of the stuff I express in the paintings. I think, I have come quite far, if the viewer disappears into an imaginary world for a while, by looking at my paintings. I also think it is very important to let go of your troubles and routines once in a while. Free the mind and open up for other possibilities.
“Colourful beauty” as you describe my work, I use as a way to seduce the viewer and to twist the wicked and cynical details that my work definitely also is made of. The colours and the energy might attract you, but when you take a closer look, something else sometimes appears.
UG: Skyscrapers are a motif that you use in many of your paintings, what do they symbolize for you beyond urbanism of the 20th and 21st century?
TB: Skyscrapers fascinate me because of their enormous scale and the closeness they are built in. It’s like, from a distance it looks like one big organism that shows no human signs, if you didn’t know that it was made for people by people. I think skyscrapers are like anthills. It is not until you are in the middle of it that you feel the action and the million lives inside of it. So when I use the image of those kinds of buildings in my paintings, they symbolize some kind of chaotic cosmos that’s actually very structured.
UG: The “reading” of an airplane between the skyscrapers has turned from technical progress into a claustrophobic nightmare. Do you play with such shifts?
TB: Yes, I do that a lot. Power plants that float on an explosion of beautiful stars, giant butterflies and roses in nice warm colours that make you feel safe. It always goes more than in one direction for me. Even if I’m scared and alienated by the technical revolution, I am also a part of it.
UG: Do you work up current catastrophes of humanity or socio-political problems in your images? I try to imagine what the canvases you will paint in the future will show.
TB: I don’t work with catastrophes of humanity. I see why you ask. There is a lot of blackness and cynical tension in my work, but it walks hand in hand with beauty and innocence. I’m not picturing a nice fairy-tale-world with a happy end nor judgement day. There has always been evil in humans, it’s in our nature. I guess, we try to get rid of it, but it is not that easy. That’s why it exists in my images, but not as the end of humanity. I am very interested in the problems between good and evil in a socio-cultural way. But to be honest, I don’t know how future canvases will develop.
Trine Boesen and Uta Grosenick 2006.
Trine Boesen and the Butterfly Effect
By Kirse Junge-Stevnsborg
The story of Chuang Tse’s dream is useful for describing the duality reflected in Trine Boesen’s double work The Butterfly Effect I and II. According to the story, Chuang Tse dreamed that he was a butterfly flying with other beautiful butterflies and living a carefree life. When he woke up, he asked himself, “Did I dream I was a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming I’m Chuang Tse?” In The Butterfly Effect I and II, Boesen thematizes this reflection on our understanding of reality.
The first painting is a skyline view of a city, the other a portrait of a woman and a car on the outskirts of a city. In The Butterfly Effect I, the foreground skyline is graphically rendered in black and white with empty fields. Behind a stylized figure, the city explodes in a riot of plants, patterns and symbols: a butterfly, a fly, stars, people, a radiator, hands with crossed fingers and a set of dentures, teeth clenched hard, with the contours of a skyline on both gums. In The Butterfly Effect II, the woman and car are graphically outlined on top of a large empty field next to two deck chairs and a big bird, while all around is an eruption of city, flowers, plants, roads, butterflies, helicopters, an unfolded Swiss Army knife, gift-wrap ribbons, wheels, a spider, a sign with a bomb and a hovering satellite universe.
The two paintings unfold two perspectives in one – two views of the city, two mental states. The Butterfly Effect I is a bird’s eye view of the city, while The Butterfly Effect II shows us the city from the perspective of the woman and car – from outside, from below. As in medieval perspective, the size and position of the pictorial elements are determined by their significance and symbolic value. The natural elements, animals and plants, are the same size as the houses. Nature and the floating elements can be seen as images of the activity and vitality of the city as an independent organism. By all appearances, the pictures are clearly powerful, riotous bursts of nature dichotomically shattering the controlled space of the city. On closer inspection, however, ambiguous and disturbing elements are seen to be breaking this stereotypical division of nature and culture. What is natural? Are humans and human-made things separate from nature?
The sign with the bomb, the row of anonymous human figures, the huge radiator (why is it so cold there?), the clenched dentures (are they devouring the city?), the overgrown plants and flowers (nitrate poisoning?), the Swiss Army knife (a utility for any conceivable situation), the hands with the crossed fingers (luck is needed?) and the black hole, the floating satellite universe. Taking the individual elements as symbols of social and psychological forces, the bird becomes a person waiting for the woman (but why?), the spider an individual standing apart from the butterflies and the helicopters (otherness?) and the houses, plants and butterfly appear to be fleeing from the dentures (but whereto?). Something is going on, but what remains a mystery.
Like the ethical social philosophy of Confucius, Boesen’s two paintings, like so many of her works, indicate that all actions and thoughts are significant. The Confucian social ethics prescribes a striving for Yen, social virtue/manners building harmony based on the ideal of do unto others. How do we recirculate behavioral patterns? Can social mores in one place shift because of activity somewhere else? Boesen explores the Confucian concept of causality and in the titles, The Butterfly Effect I and II, she links the paintings to chaos theory and non-linearity: a butterfly fluttering its wings in China can trigger an avalanche on the other side of the planet. The butterfly effect denotes a recurrent pattern of singular logic that was mapped in the 1950s by meteorologists studying apparently arbitrary, chaotic phenomena. By meteorological analysis, these phenomena over time started forming a graphic double-spiral pattern resembling a butterfly’s wings. Boesen, in her work, applies this meteorological logic to the Confucian social and mental logic of causality.
Boesen’s work questions our understanding of chaos. How do we aid in the production of common norms of chaos? Is chaos merely the designation for an as yet unknown form of organization? Is chaos culturally defined? In five images of our times – The Mind's Eye, Adventure in Wonderland, Don’t Get Straighned by Reality, Concrete River and City Lights – Boesen likewise contrasts stylized, ostensibly ordered elements with a chaotic firmament of seemingly arbitrary everyday elements. Though the pictorial elements can be taxonomically organized into classes, types and species – people, animal, flowers and plants, buildings, artifacts and conventional symbols – Boesen asymmetrically jams the two picture planes (stylized and color saturated) up against each other according to a personal logic. The elements intermingle like chains of uncontrolled signs pointing to new signs. Like the philosopher Peirce’s evolutionary theory of signs stating that signs create new signs in a biological evolution and human evolution is linked to the cultural evolution developing concurrently.
Adventure in Wonderland can be seen as a mental journey as well as an anonymous sociocultural portrait of the city. A collective image of material goods, thoughts, actions, elements of nature, dreams and different forms of community. A collective unconscious. In an intensely red color dynamic, a universe forms around the city made up of water lilies and sewer pipes, darts and kisses, fleeing horses and parts of machinery, skulls and eggbeaters. The viewer is observing a whole at a distance, as figuration becomes fantasy, realism becomes hyperrealistic, futurism becomes and baroque becomes Gothic in a metamorphic process. In The Mind's Eye, a female and a male face, looking straight out of the picture, return the viewer’s gaze. The viewer is included in the picture. Whirled into an urban jungle of drama, the viewer is directly forced to ante up his or her own associations. The unconscious is made manifest.
Boesen moreover gleans symbols from the Taoist understanding of nature and the concept of the natural, reciprocal order of all being things. Is our mental world of thoughts and fantasy natural? When is something real? Hyperreal? Surreal? Artificial? As the art historian Julie Damgaard pointed out in About Trine Boesen, 2002, Boesen plays around with the way we look at things, abruptly distorting a recognizable subject by abnormal proportions and angles, in no time morphing a semi-abstract figure into a lampshade or a phone. Don't Get Straig’nt by Reality presents us with an image of a high rise. Behind it, as in the artist’s other works, the picture explodes with such symbols as mushrooms, butterflies, traffic lights, roads, nature, a spider, bats. The house is gestalted as organism. A portrait of someone. Are we witnessing a mental image of artificial intelligence? Or an image of experimentation with chemical substances in “robots” to achieve natural intelligence?
As in a Zen image, Boesen intermingle pairs of opposites (particles of Yin and Yang), binarily organizing the world into good vs. evil, light vs. dark, masculine vs. feminine. But she also questions that dualism by mixing up elements that traditionally are positively loaded (masculine) with negative (feminine) elements to make ambiguous statements. Concrete River and City Lights are chockfull of masculine vs. feminine power signs. In Concrete River, the street we find ourselves in as viewers looking in at the picture, is a dollhouse for the bride (an image of the perfect marriage). Absurd and funny. Threatening eggbeaters (female roles or chefs de cuisine?), helicopters (escape?), bridal bouquet of mushrooms (edible/poisonous?) and randomly cast dice. In City Lights, mass society’s consumerism comes bursting out of the city like a broken dam. Streetlights, ribbons, butterfly, lipsticks. The city itself is seen to grow on stars and grapefruits. Empty houses, empty thoughts, empty lives. Similar takes on the concept of masculine vs. feminine are found in several other Boesen paintings, notably a series of three paintings entitled Strange Days, Strange Nights and Kids in the Mist. The series can be considered as urban tableaux, presenting a three-act drama about the dream of true love where everything is not what it would appear to be.
Romantic elements are accented in a graphic line: a bride, intimate lovers. Contrasting these pictorial elements are widely different signals, including skulls (vanitas), mushrooms (potentially lethal/delirium), stag (masculine forces), cigarette lighters (fire), a mysterious man (father/criminal), putti (faith/religion), rabbits (breeding), butterflies (feminine forces), spiders (phobia?), sewer pipes (waste), a sign spelling “Fear” (warning), a sky in turmoil (stormy weather), jungle vegetation (the unknown/exotic). Each picture contains its own metaphor. As in a comic book, we get a fragment of an action, but without the option of flipping to the next panel. We merely get a sense of a string of threatening elements tying the three pictures together coordinately, metonymically. Strange Nights shows a woman holding a pillow in her hand. Did she just uncover the man’s face before leaning over to kiss him? Or strangle him? The lovers in Kids in the Mist seem undistracted by the neon sign spelling “Fear.” Fear of what? Love, the mysterious man, the brood of rabbits? The bride in Strange Days represents the schoolgirl fantasy of true love and the chance to be princess for a day. But what does the skull represent? Or the stag? Is the stag the groom, the masculine force, distracted by the butterflies? An instance of the ultimate bourgeois hunting trophy, a violent emblem of male dominance – pulp novels, flight of the stag, the traditional Danish coffee klatch?
In Oh Dear, the stag’s head hangs like a trophy on a wall of ornate, petit-bourgeois wallpaper. The main subject, the stag, is surrounded by a long line of pictorial elements drawn from Boesen’s universe of symbols. The stag is pacified and objectified. An image of social power struggle? Is the stag the loser in an indefinable game, stereotyped and locked in a role? Does the stag in this case represent femininity? The chain of associations stretches as far as imagination allows. In Oh Dear, Boesen explores the romantic idealization of feelings and fantasy – the salon painting of a stag, an idealized portrait, in which the beast functions as a psychological sign of man and the fabled creature becomes an image of ourselves. In Boesen’s version, the fabled creature is embodies by the stag – familiar, conventional, trivial and banal. In her animal-human parables, Boesen points out that there are signs of non-linearity in the animal kingdom as well. Species becoming extinct or undergoing significant changes happens according to recurrent patterns. When the fox population is low, for examples, the rabbit population grows. More rabbits mean more food for the fox, increasing the number of foxes and, in turn, diminishing the number of rabbits. Boesen is always twisting meanings and our symbolics (or, rather, letting us, the viewers, do the work). Like a showdown with romantic poetry, she tells stories she does not want to open, because she does not want them to close in on themselves.
Boesen shows us that there is never just one truth, but a multitude of levels, lenses, perspectives, visions and stories. Like Chuang Tse’s dream, Boesen’s pictures reflect on the schism in our understanding of reality: What is real/unreal? What is organized/chaotic? What is parallelism? What is image/counter image? There is always an image behind the image, like a postmodern riddle inviting the viewer to deconstruct manifold, ambiguous image layers – as Elisabeth Byre put it in Solitude Standing in the Urban Jungle, 2004. Boesen’s urban universe of imaginings, dystopias and dreams can be likened to an anthill – there is a lot going on. You may not notice it until you are standing right in the middle of it. You start envisioning a whole world inside of it. Social mores, community, behavior patterns, legal rules. A social order comparable to a mental process of the brain’s cells communicating and fostering activity, images and meanings. A microcosm within a macrocosm. Stir up the anthill and chaos ensues. Carefully rehearsed emergency measures are triggered. Just like humans adapting to change or acting under stress by biochemical adjustment.
Small things in the everyday may set off an avalanche of images and meanings – that is how Boesen describes her working process. She gets inspiration from magazines, music, popular culture, books, private photos, movies, artists like Louise Bourgeois, Raymond Pettibon and Andy Warhol, ’70s psychedelic visual experimentation and American feminism. In her artmaking method, Boesen draws on Pop Art’s sampling of signs, though always in “offbeat” aesthetic clashes of the mundane vs. the poetic, kitsch vs. beauty, mass culture vs. bourgeois emblematics. Humor and satire. Elements of neofiguration, a new sensibility and neo-Gothicism wrapped up in an expressive and ornate formal language. Trine Boesen’s works are equal parts graffiti and tile painting.
Kirse Junge-Stevnsborg 2006.