Tommaso Trini, presentation of the catalogue published for the individual exhibition at Diecidue Arte and Galerie Signum, 1996

Reptile lines of evolution

Some emergent artists are today exploring the boundaries of life forms which are not yet considered as such. The best among them create works of art which, in an increasingly literal and non-metaphoric manner and without too much alchemy, link inanimate contraptions with living organisms, images with biotic processes. Their languages visualize forms of existence belonging to the borderland between being and nothingness. We witness this in the art of Jorunn Monrad, whose painting aspires to the biosphere.
In her canvases, which form a continuous surface (or a single, expanding painting), a dense but transparent swarm of reptile lines quivering with animal life (or perhaps a sole sign that on the contrary tends to be concentrated in an individual, an animated pictograph) has since some time proliferated, with the result of uniting, in a single glance, a primordial mass of iconographic replicas that configure, certainly, a single colloidal body (that of their graphic species), but which also visibly create, even if with the accents of the fable, the struggle for survival under the selection of our eye. The narrative vision of this artist from the North is, at the same time, symphonic and monodic. It is closer to the art of Bosch and Mario Merz than to the eschatological dystopia of “post-human” fantasies. Her painting not only narrates the process of replication and mutation of the reign of living beings: it also shows that the evolution of life proceeds by leaps and not in a linear manner (as Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most important Neo-Darwinian scientists, asserts). Her innovative way to change the straight line in infinite reptile ovules inspires euphoria.
Born in Norway, Monrad has worked for many years in Milan. In the past she has realized cycles of sculptures, assemblages and paintings with traces of Nordic folklore, forms and colors originating from the popular imagery of her Norwegian childhood, naturally always translating that original iconographic heritage in modern, or rather, postmodern, terms. Monrad has thus developed the exercise of memory through the phrasing of decorative elements. Memory as the lifeblood of every evolutive act. She has intelligently elevated the decoration of Scandinavian style elements into a pattern of hereditary transmittal. Initially through a formal composition: that of the ancient myths, with animals of fantastic anatomies. Later, by retracing a conceptual structure: to the primordial idea. Organic design as iconographic heritage. This has given rise to the imprinting which now animates her images of evolution as a zoomorphic species.
I like her painting very much. Jorunn Monrad is a tenacious and profound artist, more creative than she may appear to distracted eyes. As a person, she appears absent-minded; but she follows a long, even if serpentine wave. She may seem to paint with obsession and repetition: on the contrary, she maintains a calm and maternal vision. Monrad’s work has the force of a generative act, and the aims of an evolutive project.
This becomes clear if one studies her paintings attentively. They feature biotic backdrops in dark colors, oscillating from reds to blues, almost as if they prepared a primordial culture medium for the birth of life. And these backgrounds accommodate and nourish the teeming of tiny unicellular figures represented by a single outline, separated but united, thus forming a single, colloidal but vibrant body.
It is not excessive to define Jorunn Monrad’s art as a fresh and extraordinary vibrant ovulation, in which a single reptile line, fecundated by the color, proliferates in myriads of iconographic corpuscles, disclosed by the warmth of our glance. It is hard to give a name to the “little animals” which it represents: are they “big bang babies” originated by a beginning? or are they “mini-populations” that issue from the painting?
If we compare her art with that of Keith Haring, for example, the differences are more significant than the apparent similarities. After all, the only thing Monrad has in common with Haring is the simplified linear drawing of the forms, which entails another affinity: the “all-over” composition of the surfaces which thus escape any perspective orientation and predominant point of view.
It is a manner of decidedly feeble affinities. In Haring’s graffiti the scene is frontal, the linear drawing broken up in stylized figures representing personalities (pornographic, not to say blasphemous, naturally), the lines seem continuous but are not; if anything, they are intertwined in an ostentation of figurative virtuosity, with the result that the indistinct fullness of the graphic intervention remains partial, and becomes a tale. Those who believe Haring’s “radiant baby” can be retraced to the polymorphous sexuality of the ancestral pack have not yet realized that it is a matter of a bulb for sodomites.
We find none of this in Monrad’s paintings, which I prefer to those graffiti. This painting does not brandish violent scenes, as it does not presuppose the presence of a voyeur public that must be contradicted or on which to exercise an obscene fascination. Monrad paints a puzzle of nascent forms, in which there is no hierarchy, but equidistance in the swarming of figures. She creates an image of an equitable world which expands to accommodate as many as possible of those embryonic forms that struggle to survive or succumb; a dispassionate image, I would say, in the manner of the process of natural selection. Also to Monrad “beauty is absolute equity” as Brancusi put it.
Monrad’s continuous surfaces stage a sole scene seen from a zenithal point of view within an all-over, and thus indefinite, space, very similar to the all-over canvases of Pollock or Tobey. A scene seen from the above as in the case of dripping, or perhaps rather seen from below, through a liquid transparency. We observe, within it, the replication of a kind of figural cell, a replica which varies, always the same and yet different every time. We immediately perceive what that unilinear cell resembles: it looks like a reptile. But in the meanwhile our entire vision has already been occupied by the surfacing of an entire, quivering species.
What we are facing is a new iconographic species – not a particular single image – which the most recent visual arts are elaborating, I think, along with the mass media. It is a matter of a “quasi-image”, no longer a mere sign but not yet a defined figure, which we encounter in the media, in the arts and in compute imageries; it colonizes their instruments and our imagination in the manner of a network. I am referring to Monrad’s “little animals”, the icons of Apple or Windows, the graffiti “tags” on the walls and the paintings resulting from a collaboration between Warhol, Basquiat and Clemente, as well as animated pictographs, graphic “logos”, computer viruses, scientific diagrams and the not yet visible products of genetic engineering, which must sooner or later be associated with an image.
This iconographic archipelago of “quasi-images”, yet to be explored, is probably equivalent, in its functions, to the group of “quasi-species” of biology, comprising viruses and bacteria, i.e. the intermediate stages of life between inanimate material and life that is conscious of existing. Jorunn Monrad’s captivating art represents one of its most generous and robust nests. Her “little animals” will grow.
Tommaso Trini, presentation of the catalogue published on the occasion of the individual exhibition at Diecidue Arte and Galerie Signum, 1996, also published in Juliet n. 82, 1997.

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