of trompe l’œil. Instead a clear-cut identification is no longer important. The medium of photography represents the most logical modus operandi for the artist because it takes the polarity between the world of objects and its representation into account. The move away from any incentive to allow such identification of the picture should be seen against the background of a decade-long concern for exactitude and integrity concerning the efficacy of visual transfer and as a meaningful paradigm shift in artistic orientation. Norberg uses his media as tools, to serve an idea, a pictorial concept. The media themselves have no deeper significance other than to serve. The impetus is the production of a picture that corresponds to the artist’s aesthetic concept. In the final analysis it is an entirely autonomous picture that does not refer to what lies behind it. The interaction between picture and viewer is its central theme. The pictures follow a rigorous pattern of organization, that could aptly be termed classical, revealing themselves to be gestures of longing for stability and clarity in an cosmos of aesthetics. The contradictions, that become acute in Norberg’s work, on one hand his obvious allusions to and use of a pictorial grammar derived from perceptual habits in a world of three dimensional bodies, on the other, his ignoring or even negating the very same–in other words, the alternating experiences of a world of material objects and metaphysical ideas – walk a giddy tightrope which, seeing as the conflict is insoluble at least at a purely rational level, can only end in an inevitable plunge into the depths and failure. An insoluble conflict that seems caught between a vital falsehood and a petrified truth. The contradictions should melt away in Norberg’s ideal pictorial worlds. The resulting tensions describe a mind condemned to reflect upon itself and dismissive of any easy way out.
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