Cristina Casero, presentation of the individual exhibition at “Il Chiostro”, Saronno
Visions
There is undoubtedly something magic, something fascinating about Jorunn Monrad’s paintings. Perhaps the word that best describes them is hypnotic: as one gets lost in the meanders of the dense, fantastically zoomorphic images that animate her canvases, one is likely to feel disoriented, to forget the habitual concept of space – and the relationships between the elements within it – on the basis of which one observes the world on a day-to-day basis.
A more attentive observation of the works of the artist reveals that the infinity of signs that follow one another all over the surface, without limits and interruption, are nothing but little ancestral animals, miniature crocodiles or a swarm of busy insects, subtly evoked, only just suggested by contorted outlines that stand out in the strident essentiality of the sharp chromatic contrasts, based on a rigorous bichromy. This animal microcosm, which has become the characteristic, personal expressive cipher of the artist, has deep roots in profound suggestions anchored in her past. In fact, since her first sculptural works the artist has measured swords with iconographic elements inspired by her culture, immersed in an imagery of typically Scandinavian histories, legends and traditions. But it is above all with her paintings that Monrad has explored – through the form/color node – a new, more fascinating and even less realistic spatial dimension, further removed from the “objective” laws of mimesis. The painting becomes a kind of visual field, animated by images rich in implications of a perceptive kind: going beyond every rule linked to the rigid laws of representation, Monrad ventures into the spatial dimension characteristic of the arabesque, of ornamental signs, but reinterpreting it in from new angles that prove rich in original developments.
In line, perhaps unconsciously, with the evolution of the collective eye associated with the turn of the millennium – by now accustomed to the flat and stylized images of the pixels forming the images of television and computer screens – Monrad to some extent assumes its characteristics, at the same time radically overturning its significance. The artist undoubtedly stages her exuberant visual world by developing it on the surface through a continuum of signs that seem to be repeated infinitely, in a modulation on simple chromatic variations associated with the relationship between figure and background. But a closer observation reveals that the resulting image suggests further, more ample aspects on an optical level, complex visual dynamics that are harbingers of hidden meanings and, as such, capable of “homeopathically” contrasting the universe of images we are confronted with every day, flaunted and exhibited in its most banal, and often vulgar evidence.
It is precisely on a level of significance that the structure of these apparently simple works becomes more complex. A crucial transition in the artistic growth of Monrad has coincided with the discovery of entoptic phenomena, that the artist has studied in depth, verifying certain analogies with her work, even if the latter is inspired by autonomous and different premises. This type of vision, that is not the result of the impression of an external image on the retina, but is on the contrary produced by autonomous reactions on the part of the nervous system or hallucinatory states of various origin, nevertheless represents one of the most convincing keys of interpretation for purposes of understanding her work. There is, in fact, a clear affinity between the particular characters of these visions and the spatial and iconographic dimension of Monrad’s work; this is also true of the research of other artists who have, in the last twenty years, investigated perceptive phenomena, no longer in a purely Gestalt key, but with a less mathematical and more freely organic interpretation, also from a visual point of view.
The dense web of figures that Monrad painstakingly transcribes on the support therefore conceals an infinite quantity of visual, unusual “non-standardized” suggestions, that everyone is free to envisage after having been carried away by the itineraries of the labyrinthine tangle of lines and colors. The image of the little animal – almost an infantile or primitive memory – is therefore charged with connotations that go beyond a more immediate reading, to the point of becoming a kind of “stenography of our existential singularity” as Pierre Restany put it.
Monrad thus succeeds in establishing a relationship that is not just close and direct, but also very profound, with the observer of her works, whose role is changed from passive spectator to active investigator of the pictorial surface that, every time it is explored, offers a new experience that cannot be boiled down to a mere visual and perceptive act, due to the intrinsic mysterious uncertainties. And this is all the more so because the artist, duplicating the hypnotic effect of her canvases and exponentially multiplying the levels of reading, conceals only just perceptible sentences under the swarming colored surface by means of an inversion of color between sign and background. In the case of the works prepared for this exhibition Monrad has chosen to hide quotations from Walter Benjamin’s book On Hashish in her images. Due to their close relation with the very nature of the images, these particularly relevant and significant phrases become a further description of the works: “images appear and disappear with tremendous rapidity”, “little animals suddenly surface over and over again” in a universe in which “images only desire their flux, everything is the same to them”.
Cristina Casero
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