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Fredrik Værslev's Curtain Bangs

The Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev was born in 1979 in Moss on the Oslofjord, where Edvard Munch owned a huge country house for many years. He is a conceptual painter who explores the boundaries of painting and constantly pushes them. Værslev studied at the Malmö Art Academy and at the Städel in Frankfurt. He is currently Professor of Fine Arts in Malmö.

For his new curtain objects, he uses thin cotton of the kind used in shirt production. He primes it very thinly with 20-30 layers of colour in an aqueous solution. These can be normal colour pigments, but also metal pigments. He uses a long stick with a lambskin roller to apply the paint. This is important for him in order to achieve a certain distance from the painting. He mentions Claude Monet, who painted with 2 metre long sticks. The intensive and repeated priming makes the cotton very stiff and heavy. The colour penetrates the fabric and saturates it as if it were being dyed. It not only adheres to the surface, but also becomes one with the base material. The colour pigments take on an indeterminate and transitional quality. Depending on how you move back and forth in front of the curtain object, it shimmers almost like silk.

In an initial process, the canvases are created on the floor of his studio. Like a printing process, they absorb the traces and history of the floor. Around half of his works undergo a second process. The painted canvases are rolled up on plastic tubes and exposed to light, wind and weather for up to a year. This allows nature to finish the painting that the artist has begun. The colours can fade, wash out or be colonised by fungi. They can break down, change and even destroy the chemical surface structure of the binder and the pigment. This introduces a moment of uncontrollability, unpredictability and unintentionality into Fredrik Værslev's works. The artist has a famous role model for this process, namely Edvard Munch. Munch also exposed his paintings to the harsh Norwegian weather. He placed them in his garden in Ekely for the winter, where they were leant against fruit trees. He called this procedure a horse cure. His paintings had to survive this. Only then would they be really good.

Storing the stiff cotton in a folded state creates creases and edges, some of which remain visible when hung. They indicate the transition of the form between two states. One state is the state of folding and storage in the dark. The other state is the state of unfolding and staging in the light. The curtains swing back and forth between a state of potentiality and actuality. When hung, they point to their folded, dark existence, their larval state, which they would like to shed and forget.

A gathered curtain contains brown stains. These stains are the result of leftover paint. After painting, Værslev pours the remains into a large bucket. The turpentine substitute settles at the top and the heavy pigments sink to the bottom. They form a swamp of colour. Later, he carefully pours the solvent off again and uses it again. At some point, a large amount has finally collected in the bucket. It is the remains of over 200 colour shades. All of them together result in a mixed shade that resembles a dark brown-grey. This colour is the physical sum of all the colours used over the last six years. The artist now throws this "sum of his painting" onto the canvas. In doing so, he contaminates the carefully primed surfaces with the colour of all colours, which covers the beauty of the painting like an infection.

But what are these works? Are they paintings, sculptures or installations? A central moment in Fredrik Værslev's art lies precisely in this category of indeterminacy. As soon as you try to categorise his works in a specific artistic genre, they elude you. But what are these works then? Of course they are paintings. Of course they are sculptures. Of course they are installations. But each of these genre terms only describes a certain aspect of these complex works. This shows once again, as is so often the case, that our language lags behind the development of art.

In an allusion to Richard Wollheim^[1], one could say that they are paintings as curtains. A curtain always has two sides. It has something potential and it has something performative. It invites the observer to close or open it. It is a dynamic object, a quasi-object that only turns us into the subjects we are through its call to action.^[2] Every curtain refers to something that lies or could lie behind it. It can reveal something or conceal something. The painting as a curtain, a performative object of action, is a gatekeeper that controls access to the holy of holies. It refers to different temporal states - open or closed. It thus operates in a binary - open-closed - manner on the one hand, but also continuously on the other. For it can also be only partially opened or partially closed and left in any possible and arbitrary intermediate position. The curtain operates within a horizon of potential temporality. It suggests and suggests. This could be seen as its secret.

Hans Dieter Huber

Photos © Andrea Rossetti