STOCKHOLM.- Painting starts with an idea about painting, and is the chronicle of this idea’s disintegration, and reintegration, into the painting.
Linnea Rygaard makes stubborn paintings.
I am not in a position to say whether she is stubborn or not. I would in such case perhaps be assuming that these works I’m staring at are a projection of the artist and her manner. This is, more often than not, a naive assumption when looking at painting.
These works are fabricated, not merely physically, but also in terms of making something up. They are white lies, and white lies, as we all know, are forgivable. They are fabricated and modelled in the mind of the artist, during a process she describes as a contest between the developing work and herself. Already in terms of process they are successful, in their not being predominantly a projection of the artist – her determination, wants, needs. The best pieces may even be the result of Rygaard losing those particular contests. They are stubborn and insistent, these paintings – even single-minded. The best paintings have always determined themselves. Paint, the material, insisted that Eduard Manet not model the green rails in ”Le balcon”, but put them there. The work is, after all, not named after the three figures on the balcony, but after the balcony itself. Rygaard’s paint determines much of her outcome as well. Edge prevails in her works, and that edge is determined by paint. We push edge – we mask it, and we model it, but if the paint is not allowed to somehow determine its own outcome, we are faced with some kind of craftsmanship, which can, in the worst case scenario, end up under the auspices of damage control. Not that Linnea doesn’t experience her share of damage control; we all do.
This situation, where physical elements tint the projected will of the self brings to mind the state of hallucination. When we hallucinate, seemingly foreign matter enters into our own conscious stream and effects the outcome dramatically. If we accept and even enjoy this injection, we stand to experience something of a gift. If we resist, we end-up in what is commonly referred to as a bad trip. And bad trips make for bad paintings.
These paintings suggest situations in one-point perspective. Perspective on a picture plane is abstraction. It is a way of decoding the way we see a landscape or a room and, simultaneously, a recoding. One-point perspective is uniquely abstract. It is a constructed, synthetic perspective, whose symmetry can only be fabricated. It is assumed. No mortal has ever seen the world in one point perspective, afterlife tunnels or vortexes notwithstanding, which are extrasensory perceptions, whether chemically induced in the brain, or spiritual, or both. This concentric, sucking view conjures fantasies of finality, of death and ecstasy. But it also delivers the opposite – expansion, towards and beyond the viewer– into the room.
In Rygaard’s paintings, the elements meant to compose this perspective are defiant. They deviate from the rules of this perspective, and apply the rules of paint. They defy our expectations and stimulate us, causing that frequency made by the fission between what one thinks one sees, and what one sees, between the illusionary and the concrete, between the intended painting and the resulting one.
