The paintings of Jørgen Herleiksplass: seeing beyond representation
Essay2024
An essay for the artist Jørgen Herleiksplass to coincide with his solo exhibition.
If you squint your eyes, Jørgen Herleiksplass Lie’s painting Noe som bryter med en avspent bue could be read as a detailed study of an eyeball. There, at the top, I see a diluted pupil, then a rich, deep iris radiating from it. At least, that’s what I see – you might see something else, or perhaps now I have planted this idea into your head, you too can now only also see an eye.
Unless you’ve studied optics, the eye is a magical device. A tiny capsule relentlessly gathering information then pumping it into and around the brain – which then feeds back, making suggestions of where the eye should shift to and gather from next. It all happens thoughtlessly, but each micro-transaction of information between eye and head has cosmic potential. And when the eye is closed – in the deepest sleep or darkest night – it still gathers, and with the absence of a Euclidian world to make sense of, our imagination mingles with after-images, flashbacks, and each glimmer of light that finds its way to the retina’s photoreceptors.
Yet the world around us seems solid and is discussed as if we see all the same, as if everything of shape, form, and colour is consensually read and immutable fact. There, on the table, is a banana. We all see the same banana. It is a banana. But you and I will not see it the same. Maybe there are two bananas, or many bananas. Herleiksplass Lie’s paintings fight against such singular truths of visibility. The longer one stares into his images, looking for representational meaning and form to reveal itself from texture and colour, only a cosmos of possibilities emerge. Try this experiment. Stand next to somebody and spend five minutes looking into the same painting. Turn to each other and explain what you saw, you will not have seen the same truths.
The artist is complicit in this dissolution of singular truth. If there was an initial object or person as the painting’s primary source and truth, its representation is lost within a painted compression of other truths, a layering so deep it now seems impossible to delaminate them into constituent truths. Herleiksplass Lie’s abstractions and deformations contain any number of truths you care to imagine, with Rorschachian potential.
Another painting carries the title To parallelle linjer møtes. It is an impossibility, you may think, for two parallel lines to meet, not least within a canvas that appears to contain no straight lines at all. Cave artists – such as those who mounted an exhibition on the walls of the Chauvet cave roughly 33,000 years prior to Herleiksplass Lie’s – drew representations of animals from their world as overlapping forms, a vortex of beasts compressing place, time, and movement. Squint your eyes and look at Herleiksplass Lie’s Ny form, gammel hund. Could it be a Chauvet-like geological surface onto which the old dog forms new shapes?
It wasn’t until around 1420 AD and Filippo Brunelleschi’s experimental drawings of Renaissance Florentine architecture that the principles of perspectival representation arrived, later developed by Leon Battista Alberti – who hadstudied optics – into mathematical models. In effect, the two had created a way in which two parallel lines do indeed meet. Renaissance perspectival logic not only enforced structural systems of sight onto art and architecture, but through it both the world and its inhabitants could be considered within a unified scene reliant upon a singular vantage point and absolute truth. Now, more than ever, throughout the world, we know that such singularity is not the case, politically, socially, environmentally, structurally – and perhaps visually – those perspectival parallel lines are being prised apart.
Herleiksplass Lie’s series of prints carry a collective title Notes on how to connect the eyes to the inside of the head. For a moment, forget these are artworks, instead consider them as experimental drawings working to undo Brunelleschi’s geometric rigidity, as if a series of mathematical diagrams to help undo Renaissance presumptions of seeing, to prise apart those parallel lines and return to the caves. Perhaps Herleiksplass Lei’s paintings are invitations for us to see afresh, through primordial or more truthful means, without fear of diverging readings or ideas. Maybe through them we might observe various viewpoints, truths, and ways of seeing beyond representation.
