Composition, lines and not least the lighting take a long time to build up a picture. Bøe can take up to three months before he is satisfied with one motif.
Nils Olav Bøe’s motifs often appear clinical and distilled, a vacuum cleaner for life. At the same time, Bøe brings in familiar and recognizable elements that help to underpin the ambiguous and dissonant atmosphere in the picture.
He builds up the motifs according to three main principles to create space and depth in the image. The horizontal plane inward, with diagonal lines cutting through the surface from foreground to background, and the focal point, with the blur in the foreground and inward into the image.
For new acquaintances of the artistry of Nils Olav Bøe, it may be interesting to rewind a little in time. An exhibition invitation, from the artist-run gallery Gulp Gallery in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1995, where the concept was that the entire exhibition had to fit in a shoebox, marks a significant change in artistry. The work with the shoebox-sized mini installations led the artist to the camera, and the camera became a new tool in artistry. Bøe went from constructing large complex installations to miniature scenes, from the three-dimensional to the two-dimensional. The mood and experiences he expressed with the spacious installations were carried over to the photographic medium: “An ambiguity at the intersection between something concrete and something undefined and
unsure.” – Nils Olav Bøe.
Nils Olav Bøe’s constructed landscape appears timeless in space and time. The series can easily be read as a boring story with still images.
One of the artist’s great sources of inspiration
is precisely film, and especially film directors such as David Lynch Andrej Tarkovskij and Quentin Tarantino, how they think in time, space and visually.
The exhibition Photographic constructions will contain, as the title suggests, works from 2002 to 2020, including a series of black and white works, large-format photographs and a series of Polaroids.
Bøe’s large panoramas (155 cm in width) are particularly time-consuming to create, where the lighting is particularly sensitive on the large surfaces.
The artist’s work with the Polaroid series (medium format 7.5 x 9.5 cm), a new type of image in artistry, can be read as a natural extension of the artist’s other production. He uses the same compositional structure, the same way of utilizing the large empty surface, even if the image is small. Bøe has admittedly included several narrative elements in the Polaroid motifs. There are several concrete things in the picture, but at the same time the large infinite space is preserved.
