SOLO SHOW AT ARTIFACT GALLERY, NEW YORK 9 – 27 SEPTEMBER 2015
ARTIFACT is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by Calina Pandele Yttredal on September 9-27, 2015. An opening reception for the artist will be held on Wednesday September 9, from 6 to 8 PM.
It has long been true in all painting that a heightened sense of expressive contrast in any work deepens the emotional range of the artist's efforts. This is certainly apt as the viewer contemplates the emotional range and the optical sumptuousness of Calina Pandele Yttredal's paintings exploring the relationship between humans and nature.
This overridding quotient of vitality stems from Pandele Yttredal's authoritative capacity to infuse each painterly effort with a breakdown of figure-ground relationships. There are some figures in her representational works where dissolution is kept masterfully at bay and purposefully so. In some of her more purely landscape paintings the artist seems to be indwelling within a ludic domain which suffuses the beholder. There is a process of luring the viewer into an associational game within these aesthetic efforts, of attempting to lead the viewer into identifying representational elements within the frame.
The artist states: “At my first solo exhibition in New York, at Artifact Gallery, I show a new series paintings, "Through Possible Landscapes". In a time when we follow nature's fluctuations with great excitement, when a tiny disturbance of temperature balance can have serious consequences for the planet and our lives, we question our existence on earth and our relationship to nature. We see man walking from burning lava landscapes to frozen landscapes (“Ice and Lava”), or linger on the edge of the cliff, feeling the undertow from the falls (“At the Gorge”), alone with the forces of nature, in search of a safe place to be (“A Place on Earth?”). Often inspired by the wild Nordic landscapes, even in a seemingly idyllic fairytale landscape (“The Source”), it lurks an underlying sense of mystery or fear of the unknown, of what is to come.”
The suggestive presence of the artist, adds the component of connotation to each painting. This charged nuance allows each image to transcend the mere space and time component which it records. Each work, while recalling with almost ethnographic-like quality the cultural ethos of each geographic territory is also highly aware of its cultural code-making effect and its convention. The result is a project which defines space and time. The place is a dual one: it is where the ethos both of a culture or a region is made manifest as well as being inscribed with the personalized intensity of its maker, that is Calina Pandele Yttredal herself.
Looking at Calina Pandele Yttredal's work in order to identify their various notations and marks, an attempt to "read" them for their near associational messages might be time well spent for some people. And yet it would be far more pleasurable and satisfying to see each work as a living entity outside of the realm of guessing games. The heartfelt ambiguity which is at the core of each work is part of the conceptual attitude that infuses the artist's overall project. Here the real and imagined, the known and the unknown co-exists as does the unseen with the seen, the visible and the invisible, the discernible with the evanescent.
Calina Pandele Yttredal lives and works in Oslo, Norway since 1977. She started her art studies at early age, and she has an extensive classical artistic background. She explores the relationship between light, colour, and space in her paintings, lighting sculptures, public art commissions and site-specific installations.