Nevertheless, life is not as it should have been, the summer day feels like an apartment advertised with “great potential”. This is not what I wanted. The ideas inside me about how well everything should have been are bigger and more colorful than what the day around me greets me with. Shouldn’t the sun really have shone more brightly than it does now?
Because, after all, this is the summer day when I should have been out on an island in the Oslofjord, barbecuing in the sun, smiling hysterically and cooking something or other seafood, with lots of salad and an orange or natural wine. All while the camera lens of a mobile phone captures the moment for social media. The pain between the smiles, the signs of old age that appear on the (surprisingly well-trained) body, the loneliness between the social gatherings, and the meals you eat alone do not appear on Instagram or Snapchat. The uncertainty you feel in social gatherings cannot be captured with a mobile camera. This is how to paint.
That is why it is good to see the new pictures of Audun Alvestad. Here, darkness and loneliness are enough for both of us. The pictures are largely painted with warm blue tones, which Norwegian art has hardly seen in use this side of the millennium. Compositions of coloristic blues that create limited spaces of the kind you prefer to avoid. The characters in the pictures seem to want to get out of the image surface the most.
We see the human figures in the pictures in social settings, physical activities and access to interpersonal expression. But that will come with the influx. Because they don’t talk to each other, the people at Alvestad. They raise a hand, open a mouth, and glare at or past each other. But there is a strange stiffness in the bodies, they do not interact. It’s as if they just happened to be placed in the same room, like actors on a stage waiting for texts and stage directions. They are placed at a table, but don’t know why. Here, you don’t cycle together either, but separately with a good distance. Where they only see each other’s backs as someone races past, trapped as they are in bike lanes that lead nowhere.
There is a fundamental failure of communication between the people in the pictures, a loneliness and resignation that is so hard to recognise. Here is social dysfunction and lost notions.
Some of you who are familiar with Alvestad’s previous series of works may be surprised when you meet these new ones. Because relatively recently, didn’t Alvestad paint much happier pictures of men in water slides, in outdoor swimming pools and other easy-going settings with palm trees around?
The answer is yes, but no. Admittedly, the works we saw last pointed to a tradition of sensitive and ecstatic works depicting masculine baths. The vitalism of Munch and his contemporaries. Pop art’s fondness for pools (particularly with David Hockney). A whole tradition of pale photographs of young people by the pool from the 1970s (from Tom Bianchi to Wolfgang Tillmans). Karsten Höller’s slide and saltwater pool can also be included as a reference for the previous ones. Reference work that conveyed the joy of life and acting out.
But, let’s take a look back at these seemingly summer-happy pictures that Alvestad painted last time. Even here there were blue tones, and people standing alone, whether they were alone in the subject or not. Even here it was as if the characters had been painted into tight compositions, surprised to find themselves there, in the setting. Here was anything but expressive happiness. Rather, it was fear of feeling wrong, of being wrong, of not fixing things.
When the previous pictures came out a couple of years ago, it was easy to see them as a dream of escapism in a time characterized by pandemic and isolation. A time when we were all awkward and confined with our separate dreams. When we all bathed alone. In retrospect, I’m just as happy to read the pictures from that time, the ones with pools, water slides and palm trees as a kind of documentation of facing life, with expectations that life can never fulfill.
There was not much escapism in the motives, rather resignation. Loneliness and social parallels. So these aspects of Alvestad’s artistry are not new. In fact, we can find this even earlier in artistry. In Alvestad’s earlier production, the images were full of pastels, and something resembling same-sex couples living their lives in Berlin or some similarly cool place. Parties and colorful weekdays. Cozy rooms with objects, beds, and well-furnished kitchens. But even in those pictures there were contact problems. People were like strangers to each other, even where people lying naked, in an intimate setting, they seemed to struggle to meet. People lived in a pastel-colored reality, but just as completely alone.
The loneliness, the social challenges, the feeling of being alone with one’s problems, we have seen all this all the way at Alvestad. The new thing now is that it is somehow congested. There are not many traces of the pastel-coloured and promising future, or notions of a life by the pool. Only the occasional palm tree and the occasional touch of pastel remain. There are also few cozy objects left, the rooms appear more like scenery. At the same time, the colors have become bluer and darker, the composition is tighter, with extensive use of dark color surfaces. Something has happened, I think it is just as much in the spirit of the times as it is at Alvestad. He has only moved loneliness into a new era. A different time than the previous ones.
Alvestad and I are relatively the same age. We were young people through the 1990s, full of promising play, fun meta-perspectives and nihilism. We became independent through the first decade of the 2000s, with its enormous cultural growth via the breakthrough of the internet, where we could easily maneuver forward a distinctive self characterized by interests and references. We made it through the next decade, which was marked by social media and emerging polarization, by fleeing to spaces made for us. Kind of like Berlin. Then the pandemic took us all. Admittedly, we got through by holding on to a dream of another life, a life of play and escapism with other people. A better time on the other side of the pandemic.
The other side is now. With Putin on the warpath, presidential candidates in the USA drawn from the geriatrics, a globe that is heating up and more and more illiberal democracies and authoritarian despots also in relatively close countries. At the same time we are pumped full of social media, which has now become seamlessly integrated into the media landscape, of daily stories about who we should have been, what we should have achieved, places we should have visited, activities we should have carried out. Where crowds of people show us the happiness that could have been ours. If only we had done things right. I am delighted that I can resort to Alvestad’s paintings as a correction!
