Bjørn Strandenes
+47 91 88 21 64
bs@bstrandenes.no

Between figuration and abstraction

There is no true doctrine of art,

because one tires of everything,

and eventually one gets interested in everything.

Paul Valéry

Bjørn Strandenes has slowly approached painting from an unusual perspective – that of the

plaster artisan. Framing and rosettes in chalk-white plaster have been his daily occupation until

the want of colour grew too strong. He then started painting – painting the way he formerly

used plaster, by adding layer by layer of pigment, sometimes mixed with small marble pebbles

to get a relief effect. The result is no obvious figuration, nor a pure abstraction. He has placed

himself in the Norwegian modernist tradition with its ancestry in the Parisian school of painters –

Bissière, Manessier, Singier and da Silva.

Strandenes could without any ado have made Roger Bissières words his own: “The landscape which surrounds me, or the sky beneath which I mature, the light in the evening or in the morning, to be sure I do not seek to imitate all this, but I transfer it subconsciously and let it resurrect in all I do”. These are words that lit the

hearts of Norwegians, and still do, probably because we live in a strong nature.

The paintings of Strandenes bear clear testimony to this. They are generally dark, as the

Norwegian landscape is in the winter. Here and there we glimpse weak reflexes as of water, or

the dark contours of a mountain, sometimes sharp flashes of snow or seafoam, or just the

reflection of an abandoned sun. Although – it may just be the sharp colour contrasts giving us a

mirage of something that is not there.

The leap from plaster to paint is far, but Strandenes does not come empty-handed. He may build

on a solid Norwegian tradition, which in and by these paintings return to that city, Paris, in which

it once arose. Not in a French version in this case, but in a typically Norwegian.

Gunnar Danbolt

Professor, Art History

University of Bergen