Review:

PAINTINGS IN STRIPES

Nils Erik Gjerdevik’s striped paintings are fortunately disrupted by small figures or emblems.

The Norwegian-born visual artist Nils Erik Gjerdevik, who is currently exhibiting at Stalke Kunsthandel in Copenhagen, presents a highly interesting take on contemporary painting. He explores the possibilities of painting and investigates its potential for storytelling.

Rows of stripes invade the canvases, fastening themselves like a flicker of colors on the surface. But skewed color combinations and the slightly wavering contours of the stripes deliberately spoil the surface's finish. Similarly, the interplay between strong and transparent layers of color disrupts the unity of the painting. In some places, the regularity of the stripes is shifted, and amorphous shapes break—appropriately inappropriately—the linearity.

The shapes may be expressive brushstrokes, surreal figures, or emblems borrowed from the universe of comic books. In other paintings, these figures are given more freedom to play. Here, the background is not the insistent stripes but rather softly vibrating, almost monochromatic surfaces resembling a gray sky on an early spring day.

FINGERPRINTS

The paintings tell stories on two levels: one is about the painting itself, where the brushstrokes’ movements show traces of the painter’s actions, or more literally, when Gjerdevik has deliberately left his fingerprints on the canvas.

The other story is tied to the paintings' elements, such as the comic book figures and the narrative that could unfold around them. Gjerdevik, however, adds an ironic distance to painting as a storyteller, as one never gets a complete story, only fragments of one. And it is precisely in this tension between painting and fiction that the interesting lies.

Kristine Kern