Artist Q&A

Anne Aarsland

There seem to be an endless amount of stories behind your abstract patterns and

expressive use of paint. What story do you want to tell?

I want to tell all stories, a never ending story, a constantly changing story. I don’t believe in one story – there are always many stories to tell about the same situation depending on who you are, what day it is, what mood you’re in etc. In that way you can say that the feeling of ‘an endless amount of stories’ as you pointed out in my paintings is the story I want to tell. I hope people get a feeling of many possibilities and different ways in the meeting with my work. It’s never thought as a static work with a specific story to tell.

You seem to be drawn by a need to combine chaos and order in your works. It

shows in the way you mix well-considered composition and strait lines with an

expressive and intuitive use of paint. Where does this call for opposites come from?

The apparently visual opposites in my work are in many ways the basic structure of my paintings. It interests me very much to combine these visual opposites and make them play together. What at first seem to be clearly visual opposites are not that different after all. The straight lines and small hand made ‘pixels’ made carefully with masking tape are actually very unbalanced and unequal, and the apparently system or pattern they seem to make contains no system and no pattern – in other words, the straight lines are as much chaos as the more expressive use of paint.

The point is to weave them together by using their similarities in many layers and hereby make the opposites play together in a mixture of harmony and disharmony. The composition is hold together by the mixture of the straight lines, the expressive paint and colour effects – by combining these different elements I hope to maintain a feeling of constant possible variation as I mentioned earlier. I think this mixture provides a special – almost nervous – energy to the painting.

Your art seems to be characterized by a rebellious drive – an attempt to break

with ‘correctness’. Is that something you recognize?

No and yes. I’ m not consciously working to be rebellious, but on the other hand I have no intentions whatsoever to achieve correctness. What is correctness anyway? It ’s a decided thing saying that this is the correct way to do it – a bit like believing in ’a truth’, one truth, one story… Correctness is a sort of fixed answer, there is no final answer in my work. In that way you can say that correctness is the last thing I want to achieve in my paintings.

To what extent does your art reflect your own personality?

When I work I think of the work itself  – the play between colour, composition and energy that makes my painting. I don’t think of who I am and what it means to my paintings. But of course it is a very physical and personal way to work so in some ways it probably reflects my personality and me.

Beyond the pure aesthetic experience, is there a particular emotion or feeling you want to awake?

No – or if any particular feeling or emotion it would be that there’s never one feeling or emotion. Just like I want to keep an open and endless feeling of stories the feeling I want to evoke is the feeling of uncertainty, change, variation and possibilities.

How would you describe a successful work of art?

There’s no formula of a successful work of art – there has to be something in the work, some energy, some idea. Something might not to be described or placed and that is just what makes a certain work work. This ’something’ you might not realize, see or understand the first time you see an artwork.

Can you try to describe your working process from idea to finished artwork?

My working process varies between the straight lines made with masking tape and the more intuitive way of painting were I work on the floor with paint as thin as water – trying to control the way it runs. The important part is to constantly change between the two ways of working in order to make them play together, the challenge is to integrate them and make the visual opposites work together, instead of being two differences put on top of each other.

Questions made by Amalie Frederiksen

Vidunderlige abstraktioner, forunderlige stilkombinationer og en eventyrlig polykromi konstituerer tilsammen Anne Aarslands magiske og intellektuelle kunstpraksis. Hendes dragende kombination af mystik og logik udforsker grænserne mellem følelser og fornuft og udfordrer beskuerens realitetssans med et forundrende bevidsthedsudvidende udtryk.

Ved første øjekast fremtræder Aarslands værker som en intens og nervøs ophobning af energi, der truer med at sprænge værket i tusindvis af små dele. Men efter et par sekunder gennembrydes værkerne af en fredfyldt og behersket stemning, idet de velovervejede kompositioner, strukturerede linjer, genkommende mønstre samt fornemmelsen af perspektiv afslører en grundlæggende orden og kontrol. Som en stærk og magisk kontrast til det umiddelbare indtryk af kaos og ukontrollerbar dynamik breder der sig en behagelig, men gådefuld ro over billedet. Denne harmoniske vekselvirkning mellem kaos og orden, mellem kontrol og anarki, beskriver Aarsland som en fundamental og væsentlig egenskab ved mennesket. En egenskab som det på elegant og original vis lykkes hende at tematisere i sin kunst.

I Aarslands univers er der som udgangspunkt ingen regler, men ligesom ethvert menneske vil søge at skabe orden i kaos fremtræder der en naturlig og systematisk struktur i hendes værker, hvormed det fuldstændige autonome og destruktive udtryk afværges. Aarslands mosaikinspirerede billeder svæver provokerende elegant på kanten af den absolutte krakelering – på grænsen til ragnarok.  Hendes fabelagtige og ekspressive stil afslører et råt og rebelsk drive, der synes at drive kunstneren til absurditetens grænse. Det er forestillingen om overskridelsen, om forfaldet og destruktionen, der gør Aarslands værker så fantastisk udfordrende og indholdsrige. Som beskuer hypnotiseres man af hendes illusoriske mønstre og den sitrende fornemmelse af katastrofens snarlige indtræffen. Den elegante og originale kombination af grafisk pixelerede mønstre og den intuitive og aggressive farvebrug skaber et fantastisk dynamisk univers, der appellerer stærkt til beskuerens fantasi.

I konfrontationen med Aarslands malerier opstår fortællinger, der med det samme forgår for at lade nye opstå. Udtrykket ændrer sig konstant og som beskuer drives man ind i et evigt foranderligt, dybt livsbekræftende kosmos, der trods sin tendens til evig forandring har noget trygt og genkendeligt over sig.

Amalie Frederiksen

Bachelor in Art History