SÚGA
by Kinna Poulsen
With the light the creative force came into this world. The beginning was abstract, filled with light and shadows and boundless openness. This was before we learnt that airy phenomena, such as shadows and spaces, are not merely bound to the objects that create them, but are perceived as secondary subordinate forms. Yet not in Hansina Iversen’s paintings. When we take in her works today we do so slowly, searching for the beginning and openness that were.
Pauses are, as we know, necessary in any interaction. In spoken language silence is decisive. In written text spaces hold significance because they separate words, enabling readers to understand terms and sentences in contexts great and small. That is why the space bar is the biggest key on the keyboard. We use it all the time. However, if we were asked to describe this space, we would do so in the negative. It is, after all, an empty gaprepresenting an absence of letters, numbers and symbols. Still, an absence is a form of nothingness with meaning. We read a page of letters and words set in rows following a fixed direction from top left to bottom right.
Our perception of abstract paintings is not as rigidly governed by rules. Here the direction of reading changes constantly in relation to the individual observer’s perception and approach. On the picture surface what you believed to be a space can suddenly change in nature and become a key form, which stands out and transforms other shapes into spaces and background.
The exhibition title SÚGA is Faroese and derives from Old English and Old Norse, it is etymologically related to the English word suck, súga is, like suck, a verb that describes an activity occurring in nature. Súga is the sea’s slow drag near land in that tension between surface and depth, a form of stillness before the storm or the long pull before breakers crash against cliffs. In my mind it conjures associations with William Heinesen’s (1900-91) poem ‘Høbjærgning ved havet’ (‘Haymaking by the sea’), which opens with a question and a statement:
Have you heard the sea’s sighing breath
over singing scythes in the fading light.
Our life but a moment by her shore,
the sea she lives forevermore.
A shiver blown in off the abyss
on evening glow brows plants its kiss.
Every gaze lit by the same gleam
of wavering night closing in.
Ice blue and endless in the High North
the sky domes mist laced drowsy Earth.
The ocean crescendos in twilight winds.
Hurry harvesters ere night descends.
Høbjærgning ved havet (Haymaking by the sea) is the title poem in William Heinesen’s debut volume, which was published in 1924 precisely one hundred years ago. Reviews in Denmark were mixed, some accused Heinesen of exaggerated spirituality and a dark mysticism. It is an interesting critique, telling, perhaps, of the difference between Danish and Faroese mentality and it is certainly a divergence between centre and periphery or what people at one point believed could be defined as the centre and margin, respectively. At the risk of making sweeping statements, one could claim that we in the Faroe Islands have been less sceptical in relation to transcendence and pathos, than people in Denmark. It is, of course, complicated, but according to statistics Christianity is on stronger footing in the Faroe Islands than in Denmark.
One hundred years ago, the culture radical critic Otto Gelsted was so enthusiastic about Heinesen’s debut poetry collection that he wrote not just one, but two reviews of the book. In the Danish newspaper Ekstrabladethe wrote about the 24-year-old Faroese poet’s unusual maturity comparing him to the great Danish hymn composers Thomas Kingo and Hans Adolph Brorson. This is, in fact, quite a precise comparison, because although William Heinesen is rightly characterised as a modern humanist, a baroque tone runs through his entire authorship. We perceive it, for example, in his jubilant joy over the light, which is always considered in contrast with the dark, or as his dear friend, author Jørgen Frantz Jacobsen, wrote about life: it is death’s brilliant relief.
It is in many ways problematic to speak of God, nature or landscape, when you find yourself, as I do now,sitting in Tórshavn writing a text about Hansina Iversen’s exhibition in Copenhagen. On both the local and, not least, the external front, we fought for decades to gain acceptance of the ‘un-Faroese’ non-figurative expression. This struggle lasted into the 1990s, when Hanna Iversen was in the process of establishing a new imagery in the Faroe Islands. When she last year received the major Faroese Culture Prize (Mentanarvirðisløn Landsins) it also constituted, at long last, an acceptance and validation of the non-figurative field.
Compared to Denmark and the rest of the world, this development may seem rather tardy, but there is little to gain from judging Faroese art and art history comparatively based on other art histories and perspectives. We have to at least also consider the whole from the inside.
Although Hansina Iversen over the years has remained consistent in her relationship with her abstract starting point, she continually develops her expression. In the 1990s she first painted hard edge compositions in the vein of Barnett Newman, followed by simple finished shapes on a block colour background, which mostly constitute relatively static compositions. Her newer paintings are the polar opposite: dynamic and complex in a continual yearning towards the unfinished in seemingly boundless crescendos, but with precisely controlled relationships between the various layers that make up the image.
The large pieces in the exhibition SÚGA join the ranks of a series of monumental works painted by Hansina Iversen over the last decade. These works clearly reflect her flair for scenography and grandiose drama, which is also obvious in the very placement of the exhibition with the large painting in the little gallery. The same scenographic thinking was also notable in the monumental murals featured in the solo exhibition Anything is a Mirror at the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands in 2014 and the show Lonely Hearts, which Hansina put on together with Jóhan Martin Christiansen at the shipyard MEST in 2018, the group exhibition My Own Space at Steinprent in 2019, and not least the Speaking in Tongues show with Jóhan Martin Christiansen at Møstings Hus (Copenhagen) in 2020. While several of the mentioned works no longer exist, because the walls in question have been painted over, the large-scale Speaking in Tongues painting can be experienced at the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands in Tórshavn thanks to a generous donation from the Ny Carlsbergfondet foundation.
The monumental painting SÚGA is rectangular like the frame around a theatre stage - the shapes inside are organic traces of the artist’s movements. It is a large oil painting in a horizontal format, elongated panoramic, constructed with vertical rounded shapes and strokes in bright complementary colours, blue and orange. Her and there we see yellow, white, pale pink and light grey fields, covering and translucent, which tie together or split the composition depending on where you fix your focus on the picture surface. Although the imagery is abstract, SÚGA is a telling and dramatic image. But instead of giving us a linear narrative with characters and lines with a beginning and end, the artists allows the viewer to make up their own stories based on colour, shapes, space and gaps.
The picture surface is filled with light, both exuded from the white canvas in the background and also vibrating in the colours themselves. The semi-translucent shapes induce an undulating sensation, as if you suddenly find yourself in a clearing in a forest, in one of these microscopic, but defined moments when you close your eyes and sensedthe movement of the trees and leaves on your eyelids, and the blinding light is overtaken by a sudden awareness of the surrounding darkness.
– Jan. 2024
Translated by Marita Thomsen