MATTER AND MEMORY
Jazz strokes: Carl Martin Hansen drawings are cited as “the kind of jazz painted only by artists.”
REVIEW, TOMMY OLSSON
CARL MARTIN HANSEN
TAG TEAM STUDIO
BERGEN
It is not without good reason that I reach for terminology normally reserved for music review,
writes the reviewer for Morgenbladet about Carl Martin Hansen’s exhibition in Bergen.
They are terribly pretty, these drawings. Really pretty, in the way only girls usually are.
Never a man and certainly not a drawing.
Well, well, the short version first - mostly in an attempt to describe how it looks, more or less. Imagine a careful Jackson Pollock done in coloured pencils that accurately and meticulously map the eruptive colour splash in thin, fine lines. Then, even better, imagine that particular Pollock in earthy colours, and black and white. Okay, that’s not quite right. Well, I tried, but it's not so easy to come up with an adequate definition of a work that changes character every time your eyes blink.
At one moment a landscape - yes, definitively a landscape, but before you complete that thought, you see something else. A series of fleeting reflections along a busy highway, city lights seen from the last plane landing, totally blurred abstraction, or something that will sooner or later appear in images that offer endless possibility. Imps and demons. However, intuition tells me that landscape is possibly the most relevant. That, plus the especially strange thing that occurs when I stand and look at them: They are terribly pretty, these drawings. Really pretty, in the way only girls usually are. Never a man, and certainly not a drawing.
And I have to admit - I was totally exhausted after seeing this in Bergen two days ago. Then all day the next day I walked around Oslo zombified, unable to rub the image of them from the inside of my eyelids. Until now, critically worn out, I chronicle these disorderly lines in Bodø one Sunday evening.
Relevant to this story is that Carl Martin Hansen’s exhibition opened at the same time as the MA graduation exhibition from Kunst- og designhøgskolen I Bergen (Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Art Academy department) - it opened downstairs, in Gallery Premiss. I'm not quite sure why but there was a certain intensity in this combination – encouraged by the fact that everyone in attendance was older than me, while one step down, everyone was younger. Not overly strange perhaps, if not for the fact that no one my age was anywhere to be found, with the possible exception of Carl Martin Hansen himself, who should more or less be my generation. Now I could well be accused of being disorderly, but I cannot resist it - I am after all only semiconscious, and have just uncorked a bottle of Tullamore Dew because it is in fact the best thing that doesn’t help.
There are also a couple of three-dimensional examples in the room, in marble and epoxy, placed on the floor. These also have this directly seductive prettiness about them, but also work as a base of vital resonance for the more unpredictable improvisation of the drawings. It is not without good reason that I reach for terminology normally reserved for reviewing music, because this exhibition is also this – a deep, murmuring bass sequence, cloaked in a feedback soaked guitar solo. The kind of jazz played only by rock musicians. Or ok then, the kind of jazz painted only by artists.
But that thought is not even complete before I’m seeing long grass bent over in the wind, and then comes the question from my girlfriend. "What do you see?" I reply - mostly in order to be cool - that it is exactly like the image of the World Trade Center, from when the first tower collapsed and one can see Satan in the clouds of smoke, or the opposite, like the time I pissed in the snow and saw Jesus in the pattern. Piss Christ, indeed. But then there is that which cannot be avoided: I see the shrubbery behind the small knoll outside the apartment block we moved from when I was four years old. And that’s probably why I’m sitting writing this because it is indeed rare to be reminded of that. Then, a second later, I see something completely different, but I’m not going to tell you what that is.
Tommy Olsson, May 2012.