«One falls out of Calle Segelbergs paintings», in this manner writer Joni Hyvönen opens his essay for the exhibition at BO. In Svalda löss Segelberg presents a new series of paintings experimenting with the ungraspable; the contours of something or someone is abstracted to sequences of continuing spirals that only come to break at the edge of the canvas.
Inspired by what was originally costumes for Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the works introduce a gallery of figures blurring the lines between human and animal, child and adult, figuration and abstraction. With its almost hypnotizing expression and hybrid-creatures, the paintings come to challenge our perception; what separates reality from fantasy?
About Segelberg
Essay by Joni Hyvönen
One falls out of Calle Segelberg’s paintings. It is hard to remain hanging with them as there are so little to hold on to: contours of bodies in movement, spirals spiraling into other spirals. These rudimentary figures are doubled, there is seldom just one existence in the pictures, only one spiral, all shapes border on another, similar shape. There are no clear distinctions between the depicted creatures, they might be children or adults, mythological or fairytale creatures, they could symbolize something sacred or soft and fluffy.
Segelberg’s most recent body of work can be reminiscent of the animal motives and geometrical structures characteristically to prehistorical art, often in the same image and not rarely belonging to different eras, with layer on layer of paint and incompatible elements, motifs whose original unity is shattered. What happens when the sphere, Plato’s perfect geometrical form, cuts into another one and disturbs the idea of symmetrical whole?
When painting in the 20th century begins opening to its surroundings, it not only invites the viewer into its creation, but also its decomposition, i.e. a desire to simultaneously loosen the work, expose it to the elements. No longer confined within the definitive framework of the canvas, the work moves from being limited to the canvas as a physical object to continue beyond the frame, to float out into the uncertainty of sociality: chance, rumor, dust.
The geometric forms of minimalism are indicative of this irresolvable conflict between the work as an autonomous entity and moving unity, that we can only glimpse. Art historian Rosalind Krauss remarks that minimalism rests on a deeper contradiction between the seemingly objective, impersonal or scientific forms – grids, lines, circles – and the mysticism that surrounds the pioneers of modernist abstraction such as Kazmir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky. The geometric forms of minimalism are anti-naturalistic and anti-narrative, according to Krauss, but they carry a spiritual undercurrent.
Krauss ignores the fact that geometric patterns are ubiquitous in nature, not least visible in prehistoric art, including what is commonly defined as cave-art. These patterns in the Paleolithic caves have been interpreted in countless ways: as depictions of dwelling places, as parts of hunting rituals, as traps for evil spirits, as sanctuaries for past ancestors, as astronomical maps. The idea of art for art’s sake is a modern concept, but as noted by George Bataille, especially with regard to the anthropomorphic creatures in cave art, these figures reveal a world order according to rules rather than utility. Culture only started flourishing when, according to Bataille, it learned to affirm what it was not. Through the earliest examples of artistic expression, with the hybrid creature as its guardian, people refused the man-who-works, to this need to calculate and streamline one’s actions. They said, «yes to a divine, impersonal element connected to the animal that neither thinks nor works».
Segelberg’s hybrid creatures and geometric forms bear witness to this, but they go a step further by seemingly doing away with the artist’s touch. Here there is another eye, another kind of hand that appears to have given shape to the creatures, a hand that has been chiseled out by earth and erosion. They can’t be identified by the gaze alone, one must feel them pass by, experience the movement they are a part of with the other elements. It is almost as if we are looking at the creatures in cross-section, through an X-ray with only the silhouettes of the bodies visible, the plinths over which time ravages and grinds the bodies to the unrecognizable.
It is sometimes said that it is impossible to escape the human perspective. We see what we want to see. We see human forms where there could not possibly be human traces. We interpret human emotions in a living environment that is foreign to our fable of togetherness. But I can still imagine that I am another creature, I can speak like anyone, play the role of countless fictional characters from cultural history because these creatures exist, they are also subjects, hypersubjects if you will, conceived with the help of art or imagination.
These creatures in Segelberg’s paintings, equally subdued and content, often in the company of others, sometimes holding hands, and always captured from a distorted perspective, also have a backstory. They are all drawn after costumes from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, more specifically they show people dressed as animals. These can, however, be said to be arbitrary, they have only served as models for the artist so to speak, although one can still – cannot help but – fantasize that these supporting actors have a life of their own, not quite people, not yet animals, but not fairytale characters either, no longer roles in an opera. They are at rest or waiting, like the only hybrid creature drawn with facial features whose position recalls Dante’s indolent figure in the comedy, Belacqua, he who refuses to lift a finger, refuses to strive forward or upward and personifies an unproductive ideal suitable for snoozers and drones.
By crossing these often-faceless border creatures with spherical patterns, a different kind of perspective arises; as if caught in motion, the figures are about to blur into being. One could make the prosaic interpretation that what we see in the works are rings on a water surface over which the creatures stand leaning, like another Narcissus. But that would be opposing the anti-psychological vein of these minimalist works, which are hardly characterized by development either. The complexity lies in the curvature of the surface. The creatures that step out of Segelberg’s canvases, if step is the right word, as much as they seem to have frozen in the step, is «nothing more than a poor worker who has been walking around his own labyrinths», in Svein Jarvoll’s auto-descriptive words, in his labyrinthine collection of essays Melbourne Lectures (1995). For these paintings lead us in circles, they seem to continue beyond the frame and invite if not a storm into its midst, then at least a little air, an element of damp and mold, a vortex of intensity.
Like the ancient stone labyrinths that adorn many places along the Norrland coast in Sweden, built, according to one interpretation, to «catch the wind» and bring luck to fishermen at sea, these works have a ritualistic quality, a ritual whose function lies in idleness, if only to create a place beyond the demands of efficiency, a place where the human intersects with something else. And if these hybrid creatures are fictional, then what are you and I?
Calle Segelberg (b. 1990) lives and works in Oslo. He is educated at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo and HfbK in Hamburg. Segelberg’s works have, amongst others, been exhibited in solo shows at Kunstnerforbundet, Christian Torp, Van Etten, Kunsthall Oslo and Destiny’s Atelier, and in group shows at Standard, Caravan and Island.
Acknowledgements
BO want to extend its gratitude to the sponsors of our annual program Oslo Municipality and Arts and Culture Norway.