"I say what I have seen and what I believe; and whoever says I have not seen what I have seen, I will now tear off their head."*
CARNE VALE
It is a cold and white February morning, Shrove Sunday.
I am working on finishing the paintings for Seende.
My eyes are tired of seeing and my lips are worn from kissing.
I drive toward the ancient passage grave by Sulkendrup Mill close to my studio. On the radio they're reading from Paul’s Epistles and the blind man regains his sight. They talk about carnival and the fast. Carne vale means “farewell to the meat,” they say. I am snow-blind. My eyes dart around in the white and the air is thick with shimmery confetti. The mound of the passage grave is covered by a thick layer of snow, and the hole into the base is a large black eye.
I sit inside and concentrate on not accessing 3,000+ years of death memories partly evaporated beneath the heavy rocks. I am lucky to sit in a burial chamber fenced, elevated, and protected, not destroyed. I am stupid to think the air here is heavier with memory than anywhere else. It is strange to have faith in voices and faces you don't dare hear or see. And my eyes are tired of vision, but the sun stares tirelessly at me through the opening. I sit on top of the mound and think of old blue Shiva in the formless sleep, sailing on the milky ocean, dreaming up the universe, all three eyes closed in bliss. I think of Didi-Huberman’s analysis of the white in Fra Angelico’s painting as non-representation and as a symptom of the materiality of the painting. Rather than representation or a mirror of the world, the white patches and spots are virtual, elastic, and transcendent aspects of the image surface.**
I paint eyes these days and my studio becomes an odd gallery of witnesses and seers. Sleeping had open eyes for a long time, but I got tired of her stare —she looked so dissatisfied —so I closed them, until the third eye appeared. If I can paint the eye so it becomes both transmitter and receiver, entrance and exit, seeing and vision, the closed or ecstatically upturned eyes maybe clarifies my wish to make sentient paintings. The painting sleeps, the painting dreams, from its own eyes its vision grows.
COMBATIVE DASEIN
Both dream and painting are playgrounds for the eye's unruly readings of the movement score. Chaotic, automatic making-meanings and the strange contemplative pauses at spots and strokes. The symbolic eye is just as much transmitter as receiver of sight.
KISSFALL
It was the summer of 2022 and Kiss played their last concert in Denmark. During the song I Was Made For Loving You the confetti cannons shot millions of red and white plastic kisses over us, falling and covering us, while the performers spat blood, stuck out their tongues and licked us through gigantic screens.
Last year I painted Plettet Sophia for my exhibition Skjulested and I kissed her a thousand times, each spot a memory and a charge.
At that time I wrote about the veneration of religious icons, and about a Maria icon in Turkey that had been kissed so many times that it had to be covered with metal to protect the image beneath.
The kiss as a blessing and signature and the equally destructive and protective quality of the act. My mouth dedicated to giving the paintings kisses. Each single kiss is a coin in a wishing well, a witness of longing, painting with the mouth open and the eyes closed. I will paint, kiss and dream as resurrection. I paint with the assumption that the sleeping possibility of the brushstroke is to become the seer's music: a partiture of a series of doubtful decisions, ecstatic movements, and charged concealments.
Exhibition text by Sophie Z.S. Suaning
* Antonin Artaud: Artaud 1937 Apocalypse
** Georges Didi-Huberman: Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (2009)