A Brief Monologue on Painting

By Helle Frøsig

There can hardly be an artistic medium whose intrinsic self-contradictions are more obvious than those of painting. It shows us a painted surface and a glimpse of an abstract dimension, a closed facade and an open one, eternal space. Painting would prefer to disappear into the wall and exist merely as a luminous after-image. And at the same time, it wants just as much to remain a thick glob of paint, at rest in its own materiality. It hangs on the wall and fluctuates between being and non-being, between sensation and representation. That painting is still practiced depends perhaps on this "multiplicity," which continues to invite investigation and re-examination.
The utterance of painting (its expression, message and being) is articulated in the interaction of the material for its own sake and the abstract space of referentiality, between material surface and perceived spatiality, between openness and closedness. Painting expresses itself both via its material conspicuousness, its material presence and the idea (i.e. the referent) outside of itself that it indicates. It sends several messages simultaneously, each in its own language and on its own perceptual and conceptual level; messages between which there can arise both agreement and contradictions.
Thus it is not so that painting expresses itself via a simple duality between materials (the material) and images (reference), but rather that it can be experienced on many different levels simultaneously or each on its own, independent of the others, that the different levels exchange values, effect one another and join together in a hermetic whole.
I imagine that, in an abstract sense, there is a gap between the physical and immaterial dimensions of painting. In this imaginary space, the work's utterance is transported back and forth and is constantly shifting, so that it can never be comprehended in its entirety. It is in this gap where painting can manifest itself as art.

Helle Frøsig: Layla, "rød og blå" / "Layla, red and blue". 1997. 2 dele / 2 parts.
Akryl på masonit, 20 x 60 cm. 1997

Painting consists of paint, paint always has a color, and one color is just as good as any other. The color problem can be boiled down that far, if one chooses to ignore centuries of painstaking investigations into the nature and effects of color.
In a painting that does not intend to depict, however, the function of color is more complex than merely to be an instrument of depiction. During the course of this century, painters have worked to liberate painting from everything other than color, to cleanse it of its depictive function and create "pure" painting. This work was successfully completed long ago, and the problem has therefore changed.
As it turns out, color and materiality are at least as full of narratives as the depictive aspect of painting was. With its entire register of cultural and art-historical references, and with symbolic and psychological attributions, color points out into the world to something outside of the work, and it has thus assumed the referential or narrative function that had earlier belonged to depiction.

Painting can thus avoid representing things, but it cannot avoid referring-which probably would not be very exciting either. Painting does not need to depict, and, conversely, it does not need subjects in order to tell a story. Yet the subject is still a possibility in connection with painting. I am, myself, interested in painting that operates with figurative elements as components. These present themselves in competition with the other agents in painting (color and materiality), they have no more to tell than these do, and they are not the work's primary concern.
There are no limits to the amount of figuration a painting can contain without its actually representing anything on account of it. The subject, for instance a plate, certainly points toward a reality outside of the work, however its purpose is not to depict a plate. The subject refers to the representation of things in the world, it indicates a way out of the work and establishes a condition of openness.
The figurative elements do not appear in order to tell a story, but rather to organize a space for the work's nothingness.
I understand the work as a space (or perhaps a hole-the more bottomless, the better) where a number of intentions and meanings are projected into, dislocated and thrown out again in a transformed state. The space is held up by the underlying formal structure, and it is the significance of the work.
When several figurative elements are bound together in one structure-where sizes, distances and colors, etc. are combined in determined relationships-there can arise a kind of coherence that is aesthetically and formally logical. Yet this coherence is not an expression of any meaningful content. A consistent, meaningful lack of significance prevails in the work.
The figuration that appears on the painted surface introduces several foreign formal and cognitive layers into the material dimension. The presence of figuration makes the color's utterance uncertain, and vice versa. Color and figuration interfere with each other, so that the utterance of the work as whole becomes difficult to contain and place. The work itself takes on a character of unfamiliarity and incomprehensibility.
The figurative elements thus do not provide a way into the work. With their physically painted presence on the surface, they constitute more than anything the aesthetic elaboration of the boundary between the work and the world. They do not, thus, merely open the painting up with their referential function. They also help to close it, to make it turn its back to the world and be a facade.
Color can do something of the same thing. With its materiality and its physical and visual radiance on the one hand, color opens the painting up to the outside. But color also constitutes the painting's substance and contributes, as such, to the creation of the impenetrability of the facade.

A painting spreads its picture out. It occupies the surrounding space with eager communicativeness. It withdraws into inscrutable reticence. A painting investigates and expresses the visible. It is, itself, something that is seen, and it demands that its beholders are willing to abandon themselves to a contemplation that is without beginning and end, to enter into a state of "seeing being"-willing to enter the space of painting.