Press
Review of ‘Room With A View’ exhibition at Nordisk Kunst Plattform, Brusand, Norway, 2008. From ‘Stavanger Aftenblad’ by Trond Borgen.
English translation by Elizabeth Croft below.
Twisted inside out Nordisk Kunst Plattform, Brusand Train station: Clare Carter, painting, until 16 March A little jewel of a painting-exhibition, mounted in psychedelic wallpaper chaos.
The most exotic place in Rogaland’s art scene is now to be found in Brusand. Here artist-couple Jan Kjetil Bjørheim and Elizabeth Croft have transformed the train station’s old ticket office into a very special art gallery: in four small rooms, with old wallpaper combinations beyond anyone’s belief, they have created the region’s most alternative showroom. In nine paintings Clare Carter has fixed her impression of Stavanger, Sandnes and Jæren, created during some weeks stay in the area. In this work we see the view of an outsider, absorbing and transforming impressions of amongst others the Jæren landscape and visits to the Stavanger Museum and the Canning Museum, into paintings where the motifs operate simultaneously as both familiar and strange. Carter shows herself to be a master of ambiguity: many of the paintings appear unified at first sight, but a closer inspection reveals how Carter puts her compositions together from completely different elements, so that we are both inside and outside, simultaneously, in her motifs. In “The Sunday Stage” we see amongst other things a garden, an industrial building and a bridge, without finding any realistic, logical connection between them. The connection is to be found first and foremost in Carter’s painterly handling of these elements. She composes her pictures from fragments, which are held together by the particular use of colour. But it is not just Carter’s use of colour and brushstrokes or her handling of the motifs which makes an impression on me. In an effortless and elegant way she turns the inside out and brings outdoor elements indoors; the ambiguity between outdoors and indoors creates small visual puzzles, which don’t allow themselves to be solved rationally. She calls her exhibition “Room With A View”, since she creates through her paintings a space which is both a view of the outer and inner landscape. Carter solves these riddles through her strong ability to handle paint, where the crossover between concise forms and more loosely painted elements contribute to this ambiguity – form and content coalesce; and she solves them through her sensitive relationship to the colours’ nuances and overall tone. The elements created in her paintings break the boundaries of the realistic, in a subtle and discreet way. The stuffed animals and birds in Stavanger Museum show up in “The Great Northern Show”, not as a tidy museum exhibit, but as mythical and mysterious, nearly ghostlike shadows from dreams and the past. Similar shadows also appear in “The Factory (Part 1)”, where female canning factory workers again populate the canning museum.
But not in a realistic way, for both the figures and the factory surroundings have been given a dreamy character through the milky-white tones of the paint. In Clare Carter’s palette we find a latent poetry – which is nearly sleeping, dreamy, lightly melancholy – and which lies like a gentle veil over the paintings. Carter’s total control of her painterly skill allows me to see her motifs not just as they are seen and experienced in our familiar environment, but more as if they had been dreamt or hallucinated from half obliterated fragments of memories.
By Trond Borgen.
Stavanger Aftenblad, 4. March 2008
Article about ‘Room with A View’ exhibition in Jærbladet, March 2008.
