An exhibition featuring, among other things, an installation of 111 images of an eye, mounted together to form a large rectangle.

“Most have grown weary of it. But like graffiti that bleeds through every new layer of paint rolled on, the question persists: What kind of status and potential does painting have today, some thirty years after the apparent closure of its great modern history? In an era when photography, electronic media and to an increasing degree digital meta-media dominate our transaction with images?

(…)

Perhaps all this generalized talk of “painting” is part of the problem, and we would do better to speak of individual paintings. This may prove difficult, however, in discussing the concrete works of Kjell Torriset. Hos preferred “form of action” is painting, and the works bring one’s attention to the very act – and form, themselves. Or itself.

Try to recall what one of Torriset’s paintings look like after you’ve left the gallery or put down the catalog. Various aspects come to mind, but it’s not easy to remember the entire thing. This isn’t because the paintings are unclear. Half of the time one can easily recognize what the painted elements represent: bowls, lemons, chairs, and not least of all the human body or body parts. Otherwise, it’s quite apparent what the elements literally are: a floating black rectangle, an olive-green glaze, a patch of lively brushstrokes. Well, literal at least in relation to the images of bowls and bodies. The rectangle, of course, doesn’t actually float and the brushstrokes have been dry for some time.

One reason the paintings are hard to recall is that their various aspects aren’t easily fixed in categories such as figurative/literal. This binary opposition, central to late-modernist painting, isn’t irrelevant in Torriset’s work – it would in fact seem unavoidable. These categories do prove, however, to be highly unstable. The portrayal of a human figure, no matter how convincing, appears quickly to be a constructed image: a matter of marks on a physical surface. On the other hand a white blob of paint may appear as an enlarged micro-organism, or it may function as an indexial sign, signifying the process that led to its creation.”

Georg Morgenstern

Kjell Torriset (b. 1950, Ålesund) is a Norwegian visual artist. Torriset's practice is somewhat abstract, comprising works with both figurative and non-figurative elements, as well as self-written text.