The exposition shows excerpts from two ongoing projects. One photographic project that consists of analogue photography, re-photographed in the studio, and one project with painting or more specifically: haptic drawings with color, also photographed hanging on the wooden wall of a studio in Oslo, March 2020.
"Haptic" meaning here any form of interaction involving touch.
Both projects are responding to, or at least being receptive to the mesolithic engravings in the area of Fontainebleau, France, which in some ways constitute the point of departure of this exposition.
The use of large format photographic material is of importance in the photographic part of the project, mainly because of the organic character of the photographic material.
The rhythmical absorption and emission of light by the photographic grain, is in this work used to aesthetically investigate the absorption and emission of light by the engravings in the sandstone surface and the repetitive gesture used by ancient humans to create them.
I am in a way, approaching the engravings as sculptural or painterly remains of the human shape and “haptic” manipulation of light in stone. I enter the shape of the ancient creator when I am documenting their light.
The engravings are most often found close to the cave entrances, on the cave floor or wall so the light from the rising or setting sun or moon can reach them in parts of the day or night. They are put in small caves and underneath low overhanging rock that can just about have space for one or maximum two persons. They evoke therefore various ergonomically and sculpturally interesting bodily placements for the visitor. You are invited by the engravers to get into specific positions and by doing so to repeat the bodily gestures of the ancient creators. You are invited to adapt the shape of the Mesolithic body.
The photographic work investigates these positions, but most of all they document the specific light conditions in which the engravings are now to be found and they actively display the fine grain organic photographic technology to aesthetically seek the tension and rhythmical flow the symbolic gestures and traces is evoking in our contemporary minds.
In the ongoing drawing or painting project exhibited here, folded surface of drawing- and painting material constructs disturbances and interruptions in the two-dimensional surfaces used for mark makings, plane making and lines. The created fold interrupt the flat surface flow, like the straight line in the engravings interrupt the curved flow of the surroundings.
The color is in the form of powder - like dust, but it is treated, and it works like light. I use the edge of the pieces actively to indicate the direction of light and also to indicate that the piece point to something outside of itself, to the past and to the future, and that it continues outside itself and outside of its contemporary space.
Both the paintings and the photos are photographed in the studio using one singular light-source: a yellow lamp placed low to the right of the hanging piece. The yellow rays create a blue shadow on the left side of the pieces and thus accentuate the lines on the white wooden wall and the passage and space from work to background making all the pieces here haptic and gestural in character.
The Mesolithic stone lines are carved into the stone like valleys, but sometimes they seem to protrude up against us like mountains which is an effect of the one-source light – the sun or the moon, cast into the caves.
The paintings take into account the palimpsestic (multi layered) character of the stone engravings and seeks to transmit the folding and unfolding of eternally repeating processes in the body, in nature and in the human consciousness to repetitive gestural tracing into painting.
The grids and lines in the following exposition, are all engraved during the European, early Mesolithic period ranging from 10 000 to 8000 years BP. They are located in the Fontainebleau forest 60 km South of Paris. They were discovered in 1869, but there has been little research on them until recently, when a group of researchers from Sorbonne, led by Professor Boris Valentin, started to document them and to look deeper into their public significance, their protection and their meaning. The engravings are all to be found inside shallow caves, shelters and underneath overhanging boulders, and are due to their proximity to Paris, seriously endangered by erosion and vandalism.
Around 1500 shelters with engravings are now discovered which makes it one of the largest collection of Stone Age engravings in Europe. They have a strikingly straight, geometric and universalistic feeling to them and stands thus in a strong contrast to the organic and biomorphic character of their surroundings.
I encountered the engravings for the first time in 2017 from a book by Emanuel Breteau.
I had before that, spent more than 20 years bouldering on the sandstone boulders that are scattered in thousands around in the forest without knowing about the engravings.
The discovery made a huge impact on me, so I decided to investigate them from an artistic point of view.
The cross disciplinary project Matter, Gesture and Soul, presently active at the University in Bergen, was conceived as a direct result of this discovery.
The following web project, especially made for the EAA annual meeting 2020, deals with some chosen artistic aspects of this discovery.