In one of his most important poems, In Memoriam, the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson describes how
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within,
and thus says something true about the relationship between words and the world, writing and reality. The tension between veiling and disclosure is built into language; words often conceal as much as they reveal. To say something is simultaneously not to say something else. The artwork both obscures and proclaims in the same gesture.
Ida Lorentzen's new paintings at Galleri Haaken return to the world of spaces that we not only became familiar with during the exhibition in 2017, "Interior Reflections," but throughout her entire artistic career. The interiors persist, but in these images, we encounter entirely new mysteries in the entirely familiar, the almost overly intimate.
In Memoriam, to some extent, also becomes a fitting epitaph for these rooms and interiors; Ida Lorentzen's visual architecture can be summarized in the attempt to reconstruct the rooms around us, the rooms and walls that collapse when the people we once shared them with disappear. Their silence is the silence afterwards.
However, Lorentzen's paintings have largely functioned as meditations on the fundamental condition we encountered with Tennyson; the relationship between the work and the world, as if the paintings problematize their own precision and ability to visualize. That's why we are just as concerned about what is behind the door, around the wall, outside the window in Lorentzen's rooms. But the challenge these paintings present is to find things, places themselves, sufficiently miraculous; these paintings understand that the symbol, the reference, and the allegory are superfluous figures in the realm of human fantasy. It can in fact be overwhelming to understand that the rooms, places, things, and frames that physically exist around us and determine our lives and movements are real – that these, too, can be experienced, observed, made factual. But they are also waiting rooms – just as life is fundamentally a form of waiting.
In connection with Lorentzen, much has been said about Vilhelm Hammershøi, the painter Lorentzen first met at Prins Eugens Waldermarsudde in 1976 and who gave her what she has called a "spiritual platform." But her way of thinking through painting, through the table, the chair, the window mullion, elevates her into larger contexts, making a nuanced painter like Morandi a meaning reference; or the silent charge in Edward Hopper's interiors – the most important silences in 20th-century painting.
Yet we don't just see a chair against a wall, a desk against a window ledge, but lines against lines, colours against colours, figurations testing themselves against abstractions – relationships that are introduced, balanced, and that, perhaps, remind us of the world. The images themselves become like memories in Lorentzen's iconography. Even though they are seen and experienced, they don't become so much personal as collective spaces of memory, as if they remember, on our behalf, something we thought we had forgotten; to remain open towards something that remains simultaneously closed.
Classical Greek philosophy employed the concept of "aletheia" (ἀλήθεια); disclosure, uncovering, the revelation of truth. The much later German philosopher Martin Heidegger picked up this concept and placed it in what we could call the antechamber of truth; for Heidegger, "aletheia" became a type of "unconcealment" (Unverborgenheit). Ida Lorentzen's paintings present these openings towards something almost factual, towards something that – possibly – exists; shadows are cast in and out of the picture plane, we sense structures, half-revealed vistas behind the window, reflections in a mirror, in a riddle.
The richness of these rooms is also rooted in an aesthetic; the art historical span in Lorentzen's images pushes Dutch 17th-century still-life and American 1980s realism into the same space. The images balance the seemingly ordinary and ambiguous, forcing the viewer to accept the unresolved as a poetic premise. Ida Lorentzen's new paintings at Galleri Haaken are seen just as much with an inner as an outer eye. They are less rooms than metaphors for rooms. They are images about the logical effect of light on colours and surfaces. They are the sum of focal points, two-dimensional, they are painting. In an artistic career that has made consistency its own subject, the small, often inconspicuous shifts in Lorentzen's paintings manage to produce their own unique drama.
The unresolved, living tension between outer and inner spaces also reflects that between the material and the mental. Ida Lorentzen's images suggest the perennial issue, or rather the mystery, of whether humanity and the world must remain separate entities or whether they can be one and the same – of whether union is possible, if only in the art experience. The emptiness in Lorentzen's images is defined above all by a speaking silence. It fills these rooms with the intense form of presence that only absence can provide. One must accept the incertitude of these images. As art historian Bente Scavenius once wrote about Lorentzen's paintings: "Unambiguous is something they’ll never be.”
To the extent that Lorentzen's project has been driven by a longing to make the invisible quality of things visible, to translate the magic of reality into painting, she is also in the tradition of metaphysical painting. The suggestive absence in this art also points – perhaps – towards a mystical, almost apophatic space of devotion, the hidden god; the light through the window. The warm coolness in these images is receptive, it carries something naked and close to purity in itself. But precisely close, not identical. Lorentzen's gentle, meticulous discrepancies activate and pulse in the gap that always exists between work and world. In “House of Protection”, we encounter closeness as method – that words and things, language and reality only almost overlap, only almost conflate. The rooms become reliefs, perspectives that force us to see – at the pictures, at the world – twice.
If one may paraphrase Tomas Tranströmer, there are in Ida Lorentzen’s images, one vault after another, endlessly opening. These rooms become both external and internal in the same way as we find ourselves both inside and outside them. Ida Lorentzen's paintings, which may seem so recognizable and unassuming, are just as much the poetry of the borderland and the threshold. They can protect us as viewers but still force us out, so that we, now and then, are granted the opportunity to return.
Simen K. Nielsen