Galleri Brandstrup is delighted to announce the opening of “The Swimmer," a solo exhibition by Christer Glein. The exhibition opens on Thursday, 10th of October at 6 PM.
Text by Are Mokkelbost
The way Christer Glein paints seems to always be in flux. In each series, he introduces something new while abandoning something else, whether it be the palette, motifs, or methodology.
This doesn’t happen spontaneously. He is a born methodologist, carefully calibrating his homemade machinery of rules for each new round. I suspect he has a long, internalized list of methodical hurdles and formalist pet peeves, so ingrained in his daily work that an assistant could easily misstep.
Migrating from one pictorial landscape to another comes with risk. As a foreigner in a new land, one is quickly stripped of all privileges. An audience can be lost, old tools no longer do the job. However, if the change in style happens often enough, the shedding of skin itself can become a trademark, an expectation. What will he come up with this time?
The paintings Christer broke through with 15 years ago belong to a completely different visual universe. In those works, photography is the obvious foundation, where meticulously painted human figures and scenery are placed in front of roughly painted surfaces in cinematic scenes with a Neo Rauch-like spirit.
Photography and painting have always had a complicated relationship, and painters vary in their openness about their debt to the camera and the computer. Some sit in front of the screen with closed curtains, crafting their sketches, while others proudly highlight their proximity to photography and the digital.
At that time, Christer stopped sketching his motifs from found images. Instead, he built elaborate stage sets where he directed friends and acquaintances in photographs, which he then turned into paintings. It says a lot about this tireless way of confronting his own use of others' images – and this became a recurring feature.
Photography’s illegitimate child, collage, is just as entangled with painting, perhaps even more so. Collage is a hack, and like all hacks, it’s about access – to the collective image stream, to role models, to guilty pleasures, to art history, to a new self. You punch up, but also down, at what you did before.
Throughout history, many painters have used collage as a transformative tool for their own visual language. The scissors give the painter the editor’s perspective on their own and others’ material. By cutting and pasting, new hierarchies in the material are efficiently created, free from old habits and without excessive concern for the work that went into the material being cut.
This collage mentality has characterized Christer’s paintings for the past ten years. The series continuously display new ways of gaining access to both others' and his own images, and, not least, different painterly temperaments. Sometimes the quotations are as obvious as newspaper clippings on a fridge; other times, it’s just a sense that we’re most likely looking at at least two different things – but what?
For it’s rarely actual cuts in the surface; the cuts are painted, optical illusions, encounters between two or more visual conventions we ourselves bring to the table. It can be between abstract surfaces, and something translated from photographic fragments, or motifs overlaid with abstract line drawings. Sometimes the "cutouts" are emphasized with subtle shadows, creating a sense of floating planes in shallow relief. Other times, it’s just the difference in brushstrokes between two fields that creates the contrast. Christer tests the limits of how little difference it takes for us to perceive something as two separate things. The colors have the same temperature, the forms are almost the same, the strokes resemble each other – but they’re still different.
I’m reminded of Giorgio de Chirico’s studio paintings: pictures of pictures within pictures. Layer upon layer of almost insignificant elements collectively create a drama through the way they are composed and animate each other. A painting consisting of many small parts, the eye wanders between them and has no final destination, as paintings often do – where you have no choice but to disembark and move on. Who is the sender of the different parts? You must choose yourself, it’s both generous and slightly cruel. It’s reminiscent of dozing, where you hover between two states and the categories slip away.
The paintings from recent years are marked by a light palette. The range from the darkest to the lightest point becomes smaller and smaller, like being caught in the endless twilight of the northern Norwegian summer sky. The small strokes give the surfaces a graininess, like an underexposed film, or like when you wake up suddenly and your eyes conjure up things in the gray darkness that you quickly realize can’t be real.
Rather than plotting out a finished motif, like a printer, these paintings are a gradual, pointillistic development, grain by grain. This allows Christer to swap intention for intuition, opening the door for other things to be summoned out of the canvas-white darkness, the unplanned. The experience that has come with following a method allows the same method to be set aside, for now, the painterly language is embedded like muscle memory, and that’s something you can trust.
And that leads us to the new paintings. New series, new paradigm! The fine-mesh grid of cuts is gone, as is the shallow relief. We are in one world, with one protagonist, in one landscape. The universe seems imagined, extracted from his own mind, bit by bit, without tricks with scissors. There’s more risk in such a stripped-down form, and the color takes on a greater responsibility for carrying the composition. This is solved by cranking up the colors, and the encounters between them become events in themselves.
The protagonist comes alive through meticulous folds and cuts in an imaginary surface and can appear as both creature, monument, and structure, solid and hollow at the same time. The technique is more direct than before; the canvas’s texture is allowed to show through the skin of oil paint.
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from John Cheever's 1964 novella The Swimmer. The protagonist wakes up one Sunday morning at a friend’s house after a party and decides to get home to his wife and children by swimming through the many swimming pools along the way. On his journey through the suburban backyards, he meets friends and neighbors who, to varying degrees, understand his expedition, and what started as an impulsive prank gradually becomes awkward and tragic. He arrives home to a – spoiler alert – empty house, and we understand that the crisis happened long ago.
As an art teacher, I often use the homemade term "hidden informant" to describe those times when you work from sources that remain unspoken to the public. It can be anything from general inspiration to specific details or a framework. It can be a useful distinction for a generation with its intention-heavy projects, a form of encryption of the process leading to a work – where good intentions, interesting sources, and hard work are no longer readable and thus also not merit-worthy. Instead, one must choose what contributes most to steering the process where it needs to go.
Perhaps The Swimmer is actually a hidden informant for Christer, but one he reveals? A mood with visual cues; a summer-turns-to-autumn palette interspersed with the blue and green tones of swimming pools, and a figure in water, equal parts heroic and tragic.
The reference might also be a distraction. Something to quiet the gallery owner and the rest of us curious folk, so he can get some peace to work. Or like a good song title that seems totally disconnected from the music, but still evokes associations you happily accept.
The Swimmer perhaps resonates even better as an analogy for Christer's development as a painter in general. Each series goes through stages of overconfidence and despair. Time outside the studio passes so strangely quickly when you're in the flow. Every rupture is both a crisis and an opportunity, forcing him to take stock. What is valuable enough to be traded in and invested in the next round, and what is left behind?
With these paintings, he has abandoned most of the security-creating infrastructure and forces himself to paint pictures that are both the simplest and most complicated he has done to date. Every time I’m allowed to look over his shoulder in the studio, via pictures on his phone, big changes have occurred. The ruthless timeline is chosen deliberately; there’s no time to doubt either intuition or the motif, it’s just about going all in on gut feeling and muscle memory.