VESTFOSSEN KUNSTLABORATORIUM, 2021
TRUDE VIKEN
NIGHT EYES Curated by Fabiola Alondra & Jane Harmon, Fortnight Institute, NYC
Trude Viken (b. 1969) is a ‘colorist’ without restrictions. Her paintings are saturated with swirls of fleshtones, ashy greys and witchy greens coupled with bright red, orange, yellow, and luminous pinks. The smell of oil paint lingers on, and tones, both earthly and unnatural, elicit eroticism and repulsion. Viken’s works require an audience for their physicality, a terrain of oil paint. In this way, they are landscapes of weather systems that are as unpredictable as moods. A face becomes a hairy green mass with a bubblegum pink base, white strokes like the edges of clouds or wings. Her portraits from everyday life develop into fantasies expressing our interior lives and our most palpable feelings. Here is what Viken herself says:
When I have bad days, I know that most people also have them. Those days, hours or minutes are part of our life. We keep smiling happily and seem untouched to those around us. In the end we only fool ourselves. The difficulty of showing those tough sides of life makes me curious. This gives me a desire to continue…
The 259 paintings that cover one wall of the Night Eyes exhibition are from the series Dagboknotater (Diary Notes), which Viken started in 2014. Originally intended as selfportraits that she painted every day, this impulsion evolved into a body of work that turned her gaze inward. With her powerful combinations of colors she has depicted a huge variety of mental states – a veritable catalogue of facial expressions. While the works are the artist’s studies of herself, they are universally relatable.
Her heads start out in the morning and by the evening they’re only asking for a moment of the truth. They don’t want to go. And they don’t want to stay. – Richard Prince