About Motherlode

To Christer Karlstad from Gustav Jørgen Pedersen

Look, listen. Smell. Feel. Careful. Wait. See. Hear. Move. And the sound of a twig that snaps beneath the snow. Silence.

There is a pungent smell to this view. Something earthy and musky through the cool, almost unnoticeable scent of snow, that feels as if it seeps out of the oil paint on the canvas. Or more accurately, the smell seems to spread out from the large hole in the lower part of the picture – Motherlode – for really, what does a hibernating bear smell like? Lying in a shallow cave beneath the roots of some tree, covered by snow clad forest soil, the fury animal might be off somewhere dreaming when this wanderer comes by. Except from the thumbs poking out of the worn-out gloves, only the nose is visible as it points down, like a curious arrowhead towards the slumbering beast wild animal friend companion? It is as if looking at the painting entails looking with this pointed nose. Smelling along with it, as it were. Yet, this painting does not only speak about sensations (does it speak? yes), although its language works within the poietics of the visible.

Motherlode: a vein of ore, providing its riches in abundance. But the lode in question is far more elusive than silver or gold. The word probably originates in the Germanic word *laitho, which is also the source of the Old Norse leið, a word that still resounds in modern Norwegian lei and led. It is a way or a road, a path to be followed as it runs its course. But the painting does not speak about any path. It speaks about the motherlode – the path that provides in abundance.

Yet, the mother does more than provide, she also guards and persists. Nevertheless, it would be erroneous to say that either man, animal or nature is the providing path itself. Rather, the painting, taken as the focal point and entrance into the exhibition as a whole, questions neither the who nor the what, but the where. Indeed, it poses the question of our whereabouts, and how we are to understand the relationship between us – not between us and them, but us together, regardless of whoever (or rather, whatever) is implied in this question. It seems to question the very possibility of a community, or rather a co-belonging or being-together, in which there is a ‘we’ that is not yet (or no longer?) differentiated from each other. More accurately: the exhibition questions the acts of differentiation and separation. In this way, it belongs to the plunging wave of questions that inquire into the very distinction between us, the zoon logon echon – the living being that possesses language – and the rest, who do not; a chasm that has been operative for over two millennia in the distinction between the supposedly rational animal and animality as such, and consequently between culture and nature, subject and object.

Thus it is tempting to say that the tables have turned in Lair. The painting shows a man, eyes shut, lying still on the snow. Bent over him, sniffing, touching and looking at the man, is the heavy presence of a great bear. The snow lies thick and slow on the ground and on the branches of the dark trees. It appears indeed that the inquirer has become the inquired; that the predator has become the prey, and that the object has become subject.

But that would be to operate within the very same logic that the painting seems to burst open. More convincing is the look that sees a mythical place, a there where the rules of a calculative and controlled reality do no longer apply. (Our?) lair. As such, the painting lets something be that is for the moment only sayable through the silent language of the visible. Is it merely fiction, then? Nothing but a dream? Far from it. The painting resembles the dream, but not in any Freudian sense. Both are places of the provider (who gives in abundance, guards and persists), of a space where reality is let be as no scientific treatise would ever recognize: always not yet there.

Thus, not realism, neither in an art historical nor in a philosophical sense. But nevertheless, maybe your paintings are more real than any realism could ever be, simply because the canvases draw their nurture from the cracks and porosity that makes out the fabric of what should rightly be called reality itself? In a time where human superiority, inevitable progress and eternal growth are the myths that increasingly gather and steer humans from all the corners of the world, it is up to those who sing, write and paint to show that the world is immensely more unfathomable than it appears at both first and second looks. But in your case, it does not seem to have led you to address the simplicity of that which is – but rather, that it could all be otherwise.

Following this, there is the obvious yet elusive two-sidedness of the paintings: On the one hand, the unwavering directness of what is given to the eyes, and on the other, the complete ambiguity of what is actually shown. For instance: as it slightly passes out of the circle, a human being stands with its head bent halfway down, hooded, in winter garments in the midst of a white forest, eyes closed, masked, with a wolf cub in the mouth. The gesture is one of care and guardianship for the little animal with its lively tail. But the one who provides and guards appears to be tired. Yet it persists.

Or another: again, slightly breaking out of the circle, a hooded and masked human stands upright, with a squirrel in the mouth. Again, the eyes are closed, but the animal seems to be sleeping, sedated or maybe even dead. Its tail echoes the verticality of the composition: stretching upwards, eyes closed – stretching downwards, lifeless.

The duo Mothers I and Mothers II shows us that there are still paths that are yet to be discovered, roads that are yet to be ventured, and that there might still be other forms of being-together-beneath-the-trees that are yet to take place. Indeed, the paintings seem to question, and thus slightly loosen, the boundaries between us that have been so strong for so long. And in this way they make visible what I see as the root of the exhibition – less a call for hope than an inquiry into the condition of possibility of hope: what must be in place lest all things fall asunder?

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