“Rivers of empty words have run into the sea and many tubes of paint dried out since the “Modernists of the 50s” in their demand for greater pictorial freedom unsettled Norways idyllic world of art. Halvdan Ljøsne’s latest works confirm what was seen by some already at that time: this “break” actually meant a resumption with tradition, with its openness and spontaneous painterly proximity to sense impression characteristic of Norwegian lyrical landscape art at its best. Here, our own outer boundaries, just as naturalism or abstraction, also become apsects of a whole, stages which recur and stimulate each other in those painters whose goal is artistic comprehension.

Ljøsne’s comprehension of the genuine differences in milieu and growth potential are paired with the certainty of the fundamental fellowship between people in the artistic experience itself. Here is no dogmatic builder of pictures. Even the strict coordinate or grid of the earliest pictures serve merely as the skeleton for a painterly freedom of expression. If, on this basis, Ljøsne is considered a formalist, it also must apply to the academy-loyal sculptor who builds up his figure with the help of steel rods. The pictures, throughout, seek not only clarity and condensed essence but first and foremost artistic being. The motif is more than images registered on the eye, it is the visual sensation received through the filter of memory and coloured by mental moods which in themselves cannot be confined within a grid. But, fragile as they are, they can be given artistic life and appear before our eyes as a spectrum of visual and painterly elements stretched across the gate of the picture’s own logic.

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What we experience in this exhibition is a reminder that the picture’s own law is able to retain impression and memory and give them painterly existence. The nuances in a pastel, the texture of a painting. Colour’s scale of sensitivity are the tools at the artist’s disposal. They are demanding and not amenable to an urge for quick solutions. Jutulen, the mountain troll, shut the gate behind him, but for the painter the picture grants the possibility of seeing what is behind. And because Halvdan Ljøsne’s temperament is that of the lyric poet the dark interior of the mountain is lighter than we thought.”

Halvdan Ljøsne (1929–2006) was a Norwegian painter and printmaker who made his debut at the Autumn Exhibition in 1946. He spent an extended period at the National Academy of Fine Arts, first as a student and later as a professor and principal. His artistic practice is particularly associated with the abstract painting of the 1950s, and the evolution of his work is striking: from heavy and sombre early pieces with a rigorous and intricate geometric structure, to a more luminous expression characterised by soft colours and simplified composition. Studies of nature formed the basis of his abstract compositions. He also worked with collage and material-based painting.