Unforeseen Ahead– the recent paintings of Maria Hjelmeland.
By Perry McPartland
These might just turn out to be exciting times for painters yet. One of postmodernism’s most exciting potentials is its allowance for the appropriation of all past forms without the defining limits of their contemporaneous theory. In so far as postmodernism represents a critically reaction, it most commonly utilizes the past form as little more than locus and prompt. However, in what is more or less a reverse of contemporary habit, the 26-year-old Norwegian, Maria Hjelmeland, has chosen an involved engagement with the form of abstraction while discarding the theoretical entanglements of its promulgation. Her insouciant, improvisatory works of the last year, which are sustained by a seat-of-the-pants-sailing and a particular virtuosity, bespeak a personal reformulation of abstract painting.
Despite the visual resemblance to the work of the Abstract Expressionists, Hjelmeland�s paintings aren’t aesthetic mimesis or smug appropriation. Neither do these distinctly female paintings spring from a criticism or even reaction to what was a very male dominated field. Without a capitulation to contemporary abstraction’s Spartan tenets of style and purity on the one hand, and against any vicarious romanticism or snide refereeing on the other, she simply gambles on her talent– and proceeds unforeseen. Regardless of the familiarity of their form, these paintings’ character and implication are idiosyncratic and fresh, and a singular sensibility emerges that confirms them as genuine works.
To describe them is to iterate their diversity and invention. From the fifteen paintings I have seen, seven distinct and original abstract styles emerge. And this isn’t the dabbling of mere precocity; rather, each picture exhibits a mature resolution. Furthermore, it seems to me that it is through their discrete diversity that their sense is revealed. They are visual, highly colored and materially diverse. Not usually large, they nonetheless have a forthright physical insistence, and the sureness of their material handling asserts itself. It is through this touch– as opposed to any stylistic consistency– that the artist’s signature and the work’s personality are manifested. In Untitled 7 (2003), the paint lumps, dribbles, swerves, streams and thickens. A saturated vermilion makes a brazen slash across patchwork tones and over a puddle of glue, jumping at its combed, extroverted edges. An A3 sheet of luminescent orange rice paper is wrinkled, folded, torn and fingered into the paint surface, while the canvas itself is creased, scored and punctured, and further large cuts of canvas are sown back into the surface. And, as a simultaneous arrest and coda, an ochre line of masking tape guillotines the action and gives the painting an edge 2 inches before its bottom proper.
A vigorously chromatic palette is common but, because experimentation is the only norm, the palette can shift to the tautly tonal or even to the lights of pastoral calm. Aesthetically, the works are very alluring. Yet Hjelmeland balances her natural flair for the beautiful with a certain intelligence and taste. While the coloring is measured and seductive– taking its pointers from 19th and 20th century tradition– it has been extended to include the bold and glaring hues that characterize design and pop art. Acid yellows, bee-striped with an oily liquorice-blue, or chocolate mousse splurges pitted with tart pink paw prints. The moments of elegy that abstraction naturally lends itself to are visually qualified, or otherwise interrupted by the vulgar or the cartoonish, or sometimes even by a caustic bite from the Pattern and Decoration Movement.
Contrary to the works of the majority of the Abstract Expressionists, these pictures possess a rare quality of mood: my feeling being that the greater amount of Abstract Expressionist work was characterized by sensation as opposed to mood, which is a big difference. Although Hjelmeland’s work is likely to strike the viewer initially as sensational, it has none of Abstract Expressionism’s sublime angst or its gruellingly necessitated and final quality of image. In her defense, the mythic and heroic proportions that this implies are probably quite foreign to Hjelmeland’s sensibility; her resources have their basis in prodigal flair and quick invention. The voice here is whispered, acute and prudent; as objects they are intimate and mutual. Rothko said big paintings, in so far as they wrap around the viewer, are intimate. However that’s a different intimacy, the sensation of being enveloped completely inside an environment. Hjelmeland’s works, the small pieces in particular, often have the closer presence of a person.
This mood of theirs is often informed by an unusual spatial quality. Lots of the works, even some of the square images, tend to encourage a lateral reading, which engages the eye in such a manner that they seem to take to ages to traverse; they feel much longer than they are. It’s a quality to be found in Vermeer and some of the less overt Twombly’s, and it makes for a lightness and a rare, contradictory limbo.
There are some things that Hjelmeland’s work needs, but these present limitations are the natural limitations of her short time with the medium. The exigencies of painting are so strenuous, and the line that marks quality so high, any assessment of a young painter can only be provisory. In Hjelmeland’s case we can only collate and remark: a hazard of natural talent and a personality of singular invention.
