Private View: Friday 29th July, 6:30 - 9pm
Berlin
Long, pastel-coloured water slides and rollercoasters wind through lush, tropical landscapes – pink bodies slipping down flumes to erupt in a white spray or strapped into carts with their arms flung joyously into the air. These are portraits of an endless summer, a place caught between reality and dream. In his latest exhibition entitled Priority Lane at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, Norwegian artist Audun Alvestad continues his explorations into the concept of leisure. Drawing on the aspirational culture of travel, Alvestad’s paintings evoke a feeling of desire and longing, transporting us into a world that is at once familiar and strange, intimate and untouchable.
The exhibition’s title makes playful reference to these opposing ideas by playing on the notion of exclusivity. It was inspired by an article the artist came across in a Norwegian newspaper about a theme park offering visitors the opportunity to upgrade their ticket to allow them priority access to the rides, for an extra cost. Alvestad was struck by the paradox: how you can arrive at a place only to be told there’s another door, another level, another experience beyond your reach. In other words, we never quite arrive anywhere. Indeed, there is something uncannily similar about the paintings in this latest body of work. While some depict waterparks and others rollercoasters, there is a sense of consistency or even repetition in the leafy green landscape, the colour palette of pastel pinks and blues and the swooping curved lines of the slides and theme park rides. They belong to the same world and yet we are unable to name the precise location or time. ‘There are so many images of these holiday destinations that they feel familiar to us, even if we haven’t been there in person. It becomes a kind of vague, collective memory and perhaps sometimes, that image or idea of a place is more exciting than the reality,’ says Alvestad.
Like the images we encounter on Instagram or Pinterest, however, there is comfort to be found in the escapism that Alvestad’s paintings offer. They transport us beyond the mundane; the twisting lines of slides and rollercoasters pull the gaze deeper into the landscape, enacting a kind of visual hypnosis that’s intensified when the paintings are hung together. Indeed, in many of the works the lines appear to extend off the edges of the canvas, blurring the boundaries between where one painting ends and the next begins. This is, in part, what inspired Alvestad to create a triptych for this latest exhibition. Split across three vertical panels, the painting encapsulates the microcosm of a theme park: the pale pink tracks of the rollercoaster run in endless loops against a picture-perfect blue sky. Yet, it’s unclear how we are to interpret this scene: is it a dream of never-ending bliss, or a vision of creeping entrapment? As with all of his paintings, Alvestad deliberately leaves the narrative open-ended so that each time we return to the work, we are able to see it afresh.
It is this sense of renewal that sets the works apart from endless scroll of digital images. As we examine the scenes more closely, the familiarity of the image comes apart: we become aware of the artifice, of the artist’s hand, of the ways in which the gaze is led. The smooth surface of water is broken down into rough brushstrokes while the spray at the end of a slide is created through flicks of white paint. These are the points at which the work comes alive, where we are able to see beyond our expectations of what an image is or should be and to discover each painting on its own terms.
