The paintings of Jørgen Herleiksplass: seeing beyond representation

If you squint your eyes, Jørgen Herleiksplass Lie’s painting Noe som bryter med en avspent bue could be read as

a detailed study of an eyeball. There, at the top, I see a diluted pupil, then a rich, deep iris radiating from it. At

least, that’s what I see – you might see something else, or perhaps now I have planted this idea into your head,

you too can now only also see an eye.

Unless you’ve studied optics, the eye is a magical device. A tiny capsule relentlessly gathering information then

pumping it into and around the brain – which then feeds back, making suggestions of where the eye should shift

to and gather from next. It all happens thoughtlessly, but each micro-transaction of information between eye and

head has cosmic potential. And when the eye is closed – in the deepest sleep or darkest night – it still gathers,

and with the absence of a Euclidian world to make sense of, our imagination mingles with after-images,

fashbacks, and each glimmer of light that fnds its way to the retina’s photoreceptors.

Yet the world around us seems solid and is discussed as if we see all the same, as if everything of shape, form,

and colour is consensually read and immutable fact. There, in the window, is a bird. We all see the same bird. It

is a bird. But you and I will not see it the same. Maybe there are two birds, or many birds. Herleiksplass Lie’s

paintings fght against such singular truths of visibility. The longer one stares into his images, looking for

representational meaning and form to reveal itself from texture and colour, only a cosmos of possibilities

emerge. Try this experiment. Stand next to somebody and spend fve minutes looking into the same painting.

Turn to each other and explain what you saw, you will not have seen the same truths.

The artist is complicit in this dissolution of singular truth. If there was an initial object or person as the

painting’s primary source and truth, its representation is lost within a painted compression of other truths, a

layering so deep it now seems impossible to delaminate them into constituent truths. Herleiksplass Lie’s

abstractions and deformations contain any number of truths you care to imagine, with Rorschachian potential.

Another painting carries the title To parallelle linjer møtes. It is an impossibility, you may think, for two parallel

lines to meet, not least within a canvas that appears to contain no straight lines at all. Cave artists – such as those

who mounted an exhibition on the walls of the Chauvet cave roughly 33,000 years prior to Herleiksplass Lie’s –

drew representations of animals from their world as overlapping forms, a vortex of beasts compressing place,

time, and movement. Squint your eyes and look at Herleiksplass Lie’s Ny form, gammel hund. Could it be a

Chauvet-like geological surface onto which the old dog forms new shapes?

It wasn’t until around 1420 AD and Filippo Brunelleschi’s experimental drawings of Renaissance Florentine

architecture that the principles of perspectival representation arrived, later developed by Leon Battista Alberti –

who had studied optics – into mathematical models. In effect, the two had created a way in which two parallel

lines do indeed meet. Renaissance perspectival logic not only enforced structural systems of sight onto art and

architecture, but through it both the world and its inhabitants could be considered within a unifed scene reliant

upon a singular vantage point and absolute truth. Now, more than ever, throughout the world, we know that such

singularity is not the case, politically, socially, environmentally, structurally – and perhaps visually – those

perspectival parallel lines are being prised apart.

Herleiksplass Lie’s series of prints carry a collective title Merknader om hvordan du kobler øynene til innsiden

av hodet. For a moment, forget these are artworks, instead consider them as experimental drawings working to

undo Brunelleschi’s geometric rigidity, as if a series of mathematical diagrams to help undo Renaissance

presumptions of seeing, to prise apart those parallel lines and return to the caves. Perhaps Herleiksplass Lie’s

paintings are invitations for us to see afresh, through primordial or more truthful means, without fear of

diverging readings or ideas. Maybe through them we might observe various viewpoints, truths, and ways of

seeing beyond representation.

Will Jennings