Dag Erik Elgin
What’s your relationship to tradition?
Painting comprises a vast and illustrious tradition, which you are unavoidably made a part of. You are entering a field as soon as you start producing art, which not only carries with it the weight of its own history, but also represents a medium that has lost its privileged position. This burden can become too heavy and one has to be aware of the necessity to leave some of the historical baggage behind.
Basically, one should be well informed without over-indulging in historical nostalgia. At the same time, it should be allowed to act freely, move forward and do something which is not necessarily ‘new’ but which has actuality and lends itself to dialogue.
Maybe the younger generation has a more relaxed manner of working, without too many overly serious viewpoints about the death of painting, commercialism, painting’s status and other related matters?
Even the so-called new media are encumbered with convention, genre and tradition. So, in a sense, painting can be said to have lost some of its purely anachronistic stance and has simply become one among many co-existing aesthetic practises. The abandoning of conventional genre divisions and the shift towards inter-medial art practices not only open up the field, they also put the emphasis on content, ideas, concepts rather than on media-specific strategies.
But the opinions towards and about painting still seem to be heated?
I have never accepted that painting cannot ask questions about the social. From its very beginning, painting has been tightly interwoven with historical and social events. To say that painting is merely self-referential and regressive and therefore lacks authority and relevance today is an argument that is not media-specific, but based on content. As with any other aesthetic practice, painting requires a strong conceptual self-understanding in order to function as a tool within a broader social context.
We could also talk about the way painting was removed from the social and how painting’s qualities and painters’ intentions have been obfuscated by discourse.
If a painting addresses a specific social situation, it is clearly no guarantee that the work will avoid labelling such as conservative or anachronistic. In many instances, art has been used to further quite dubious causes and obviously, that is something one has to take into account when using painting as a means for developing a particular aesthetic practice.
I am not using the medium in a purely self-referential way, unconscious of the negative aspects connected to painting. The way I see it, the knowledge of the negative connotations related to painting seems to strengthen the possibility of working with it as a medium in an analytical and self-reflective manner.
What about time and slowness?
There is a wide variety of speeds connected to painting, ranging from purely mechanical operations such as stretching and priming the canvas, to high-risk operations where everything is at stake. Or it can simply be the intellectual and visual pleasure of deciphering its many languages.
There is a certain temporal sensibility that informs and enters the artwork on many different levels. The experience of great art is always closely linked to an element of heightened awareness of time. When I was around 20 I visited the Capitoline Museum in Rome where they have a small painting by Velasquez entitled Unknown Gentleman with Blue Collar. I remained standing before that work for a long time without really having decided to do so. The painting somehow insisted and a very exact experience of time was given to me.
I have kept a postcard of this painting to remind me of a unique moment and a certain feeling of losing oneself. My experience with the Velasquez painting was one of abandonment and the realisation that it is in the absence of time that time gains its significance.
You have worked on a series of paintings called Sinthome, a title which relates to a term coined by Jacques Lacan. Did you read a lot of Lacan?
I first came across Lacan in various art-related texts. His writing often analyses the things in life which are impossible to analyse - this is of course a highly relevant practice in relation to art.
Sinthome, if I understand Lacan correctly, does not constitute the opposite of a symptom, but rather signifies a highly explicit feeling that miraculously seems to escape appellation. The moment you try to define it, it slips away. You are confronted with the consequence of having posed the wrong question, as the object simply withdraws.
In a way, your works are manifestations of Sinthome on several levels - optically and conceptually - and it is as if they do not really need that title.
I use the term Sinthome for a specific reason. I find highly descriptive titles problematic, nevertheless I like titles that refer to personal experience. The term Sinthome encompasses both the personal and the highly analytical, demonstrating a subtle balancing act rather than a compromise.
Does seriality have a specific meaning for you?
I would prefer the term 'sequence' since seriality for me is somehow restricted to certain Minimalist strategies such as repetition and neutrality. Sinthome is an open project where the canvas ideally functions as a projection surface for incorporating a wide range of visual information. The individual paintings that comprise the sequence are not related through genre but through the method in which the different visual sources are brought together and worked through.
Kari Immonen
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