When it bubbles and bursts
By Line Rosenvinge, 2010.
It bubbles and bursts in the paintings and on the walls beside them. That is Trine Boesen’s style – terribly messy. One feels like holding a magnet over one of her paintings in order to see if the image can be pulled together. It doesn’t happen, it doesn’t want to! It wants to be terribly, wonderfully messy.
Like when a woman empties her handbag out on the floor or a forgotten drawer gets turned upside down – out falls the world, or at least a world of small things and assorted man-made stuff. All this mess is not annoying because it is overwhelming in a positive sense.
You find things you know, and things you think you know, and things you would like to get to know. Together they form an image which you can’t complete – like a rebus which plays with your mind.
So even though the artist samples contemporary and global urban culture and stories from her own life, it does not end up in chaos. This being largely due to the colours she uses. The colours in Trine Boesen’s paintings are within the same family and work to bind the images together because a white mixing colour and a discrete neon-coloured porno-palette runs throughout her work.
Trine Boesen has a defined style in which one looks down towards the horizon or looks up to a vanishing point. The proportions used are out of tune with reality. It is a seductive chaos! The size of the objects depicted is secondary to the content of the painting…a streetlight could be the same size as a lipstick, while no-one reveals what all sorts of wrappings were meant to contain.
The motif runs together. Not because it would let itself be read as a baroque still-life in a tradition-heavy way, but because it – in a modern way – would let itself be read as an image of the moment.
When these peculiar paintings hang together in an empty white space, they evoke a feeling of a world of black holes filled with things one has forgotten. The artist knows. She comes up with the painting of cracks and bubbles on the wall in between the paintings, so that the captivating sense of space further asserts itsel
The paintings impose themselves on us. The painted parts of the walls draw connecting lines and capture the spectator. The main character is your body in the space, between the paintings. The images refuse you the privileged position of the spectator, they prod you, so that you flounder around in the net in that space that appears, as a result of the way in which the artist has drawn on the walls and staged the paintings.
The staging is therefore bodily and not narrative. There is no sequence, no Archimedean point, no beginning. There is, on the other hand, a demand for a significant presence.
The spectator is simply captivated into letting herself be blown around by it – as with the individual motifs, which whirl around the canvases. It can therefore be a slippery slope to give oneself in to the paintings, especially when they are staged in a space with the painting on the walls.
When Trine Boesen paints , she doesn’t create ”just pictures”. Trine Boesen creates space, draws on the walls and stages her paintings. When that happens she creates both spaces and cracks between these spaces, as a reminder that everything can crack, so that the light can come in, or out.
The paintings are in themselves filled with cracks. They breathe in spite of the layered denseness of the motif. The paintings in the space creates holes between themselves, but they do also have lots of holes within. The artists dares to show the bare white canvas between the dense painted areas. In short, the paintings can breathe, in spite of what is at times an extreme and layered denseness of motif.
We are reminded that we take everything for granted. Before reflection, comes the sense of connectedness. Art helps us on the way to this. The art can describe and show the world as it looks. The art does not have to explain nor to analyze –it suffices to offer us the so desired connectedness. As people we are inextricably linked to reality and we find ourselves in a confrontation with reality. Staged paintings like the ones by Trine Boesen assist in this confrontation and make us more open.
The paintings can sometimes seem ”drawn”, in the same way as there can be drawing on the wall. This is due to the precision in the rendering of the objects.
The objects in the paintings can be (and are sometimes) precise, photographic depictions. There are no spontaneous splashes and spills of paint here, which are allowed to run their own course. On a symbolic level the paintings are untamable, but confident order exists on a formal level.
The artist often travels, always bringing her camera and notepad. It is not only pictures she brings with her home as inspiration – it is the whole package. The atmosphere, colours, and sounds find their way to the studio. For example, one of her paintings incorporates the atmosphere of San Francisco and Tokyo, the echo of a song and an alleyway from Amager.
It is the places and objects that interest the artist. The people and feelings are formally absent. In reality it is actually your personality, the paintings and their staging acts upon. They ask you to remember to create connection, and associate with the painting’s gathering of objects in spinning futuristic spaces.
That is why it is seductive to see the paintings together in a space where they are carefully placed, so that they set us off on a journey. Like in a cartoon’s first or last page, or in the split second before sleep succumbs to dreaming.