The exhibition title “Don’t Look Back”, which both Jordan Peterson and any influencer or entrepreneurial coach would like, rings hollow in the face of Aalrust’s paintings. The figures bravely follow the call to look forward, although they too know that the air is in process of exiting the (hot air) balloon.
It often seems to be painterly issues that motivate Aalrust to choose specific motifs. In the work Untitled (Backlit) it is perhaps not portraying the man in the foreground that is most important, but precisely painting the rainwater, in backlight, which flows from the awning behind him. And in Grass (Reclining figure) you can sense the artist’s joy in painting the feeling of a semi-dry meadow. Here you see a juxtaposition of two clothed smoking men and a naked woman sunbathing, which brings to mind Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (Breakfast on the Green). As in Norwegian and English, the French word for grass is used; l’herbe , also to refer to marijuana. The title of the work Grass (Reclining figure)thus pointing both to the smoking men in the background, to the meadow, to Manet’s famous work, but also to Henry Moore’s most famous motif: reclining figure . The reference to Moore can also be found again in another painting in the exhibition, Less is Moore (Reclining figure) , where one of his female sculptures is mounted in front of a burning modernist villa, as seemingly unimportant elements in an otherwise excessively romantic landscape bathed in moonlight. This is how many of the paintings in Endre Aalrust’s exhibition are woven together. They are not part of one big project, and they are not always painted in the same way, but they have common references and are characterized by the images that interest him and that surround us – images from the news, Instagram, dating apps and art history.
