NINA ROOS

ANDERS KREUGER: Shall we first talk about something that creates a kind of background for your exhibition at Lunds konsthall, Sweden, in April–June 2019?

 We have a series titled Not Yet Said, Not Yet Done: four larger paintings on acrylic glass from 2008. It originated during our trip to Udmurtia. This is not an independent country, but a republic within the Russian Federation, west of the Ural Mountains. We were there to attend an art camp in a village, for a few days in July 2007.



NINA ROOS: We participated in some activities organised by Udmurt artists. Holotropic breathwork!



AK: Lying on the floor for two hours and hyperventilating, until your brain goes into overdrive because it becomes oversaturated with oxygen… You were very good at it, I remember!



NR: Afterwards I read that you really must check your blood pressure before participating in such exercises. It could have ended badly!



AK: I myself had to take care of our group and make sure that everyone was all right, so I never managed to get into the astral spheres... Therefore, you have to describe to me what really happened in the exercise!



NR: The most remarkable thing was that I totally lost track of space and time. Afterwards I couldn’t tell if I had been on the floor for an hour or eight hours. It was a sign that I was transported into another stage. I had some visions, but I can’t fully recall the images that emerged. Kinds of astral spaces, perhaps.

 After each session we had to describe to each other what we had experienced. Then it became clear that everyone had had very different experiences. If you can get far enough, this becomes a kind of levitation experience. The artists in Udmurtia do these holotropic exercises to gain access to creative energy.



AK: And so did you, in fact! These paintings emerged from the memory of the sessions, because you didn’t paint them out there…



NR: No. But I can remember that I felt very creative after that week. It did give me energy! And this lasted a few years.


AK: The four paintings are, in fact, something of a decisive moment in your catalogue. They come across as somewhat more lucid and self-evident that what you had done before. They are also more monumental. But I wouldn’t say that they contain any visual elements that directly refer to something supernatural.



NR: No, they are absolutely not illustrations of the occult. I remember arriving at these images quite fast, which is not always the case with me. So, it is possible that the sessions out there opened some new spaces inside of me.



AK: Have you tried to work in similar ways later? With some kind of sessions?



NR: No, I haven’t, actually. I don’t think you should be doing this alone; it requires being part of a group.



AK: How would you yourself describe Not Yet Said, Not Yet Done? Do the paintings stand alone in your catalogue, so to speak, or have they generated something new?



NR: They capture something palpable, a spatial presence, an almost photographic vision. Yet at the same time they also contain something more abstract, which I have continued adding to. In retrospect I can define them as four visualisations of an interdependent inside and outside. The four paintings undermine the viewer’s position in relation to what is being viewed.



AK: They were first exhibited in Tallinn in 2008, in the group exhibition ‘The Continental Unconscious: Contemporary Art and the Finno-Ugrian World’ that was the outcome of our trip, and then again at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2009. Some in the audience may have seen them before, but I suppose that doesn’t matter?



NR: It is possible to see a work more than once!



AK: It is! Especially in new constellations.

Regarding the Point of Restraint

ANDERS KREUGER: The next large body of work – if we disregard the drawings, which we will perhaps address later – is something you have titled Regarding the Point of Restraint. It comprises a series made for another exhibition I invited you to in Antwerp in 2017. ‘A Temporary Futures Institute’ was a rather bizarre configuration of artists and futures studies scholars. For me it was satisfying to be able to give each artist a specific space to work with, and more time than usual to install the works.



NINA ROOS: The space I was given was the space between four columns, since the walls in all the exhibitions halls ‘belonged to’ another artist…



AK: Yes, Alexander Lee from French Polynesia, whom I had given the task to paint all the walls. So, your paintings had to step out onto the floor; they couldn’t be hung on the walls.



NR: And then I built a pavilion around the four columns and had the paintings inserted into niches in its walls. The pavilion had a distinct outside and an equally distinct inside, with three different colours and different degrees of shine: matte on the inside and high-gloss on the outside. The columns also became part of the construction. They were a glossy oxblood, like two of the walls, because that colour had also been woven into the paintings. And then there was a greenish tan colour, also high-gloss, on the lateral walls…



AK: And the inside was something that might be called matt Pompeian orange. Burnt orange tending towards Pompeian red.



NR: I repeated these colours in Lund, but within a different spatial construction.



AK: This will now be the first work you see in the exhibition. How will visitors encounter the paintings as they enter the gallery?



NR: They will not be immediately visible from the entrance, because they are built into the pavilion, the architectural body. Visitors must enter it or move around it to see the paintings.



AK: Perhaps we should also say something about what conditioned these paintings. The exhibition in Antwerp, which as I said was an encounter between artists and futures studies scholars, was divided into four thematic blocs. The starting point was ‘Four Futures’, a figure of thought developed in the 1960s by Jim Dator, a now legendary researcher in Hawaii. He speaks about ‘continued growth’, ‘collapse’, ‘discipline’ and ‘transformation’.

I divided the artists into four groups according to these themes and you were assigned the first of them, ‘continued growth’, which of course you proceeded to ignore in an elegant way, but at the same time not quite, because you still devised a form to go with the notion. This form is partly the total chromatic impact of the pavilion and the paintings, but the paintings also have a visual, figurative theme: a kind of rope, or line, or sinew...



NR: When I embarked on the project of visualising this state of restrained energy I also started working with the notion of restraint. I did that by representing knots, threads and other objects. These are realistically rendered, almost palpably, because I wanted clear correlations between distinct elements in my works and our reality. Without such palpable representations, the paintings risk being read as belonging to a closed system.



AK: These knots often feel a bit bandaged. It is as if they needed bits of tape or compresses around them to hold them together. This becomes a visual sub-theme in the paintings. Yet it might have been just a little bit difficult to see just how you connected this to the notion of growth…



NR: Of course, it was a critique of the growth theme! Some things must be restrained rather than expansive...

Condensed Risk

ANDERS KREUGER: Yet another presence in the Front Hall of Lunds konsthall was the colour you gave the walls on the first floor. You turned the entire gallery into a ‘colour sculpture’ by transforming all the walls surrounding the inner courtyard into a ‘body of colour’ inserted, as it were, into the architecture.



NINA ROOS: The wall colour was a blue-grey hue with enhanced luminosity, not too dense. Remember that the walls of the pavilion are very saturated and glossy. Moreover, the paintings that hung in the Rear Hall – the two most recent series – also have a certain chromatic heaviness.



AK: Yes, shall we talk a little bit about those? One series with larger paintings will hang on the rear wall, and another new series with smaller paintings will hang above the balcony, on the first floor of the Rear Hall. So, these two series will have a conversation with each other across the space. Where the smaller paintings hang the wall will be painted; where the larger ones hang it will be white. Does this latter series have a title, by the way?



NR: I call it Risk. But the whole business of titles is always incredibly difficult. How do you translate an artwork into a title? How do you put things into words in the first place? This is all becoming more and more impenetrable to me. The title is the artist’s first reading of the work, intended to guide viewers without directing them. I think ‘risk’ is an interesting abstract word. What does it imply? Something preceding an imaginable event that hasn’t yet occurred, the probability of something you would prefer not to occur.



AK: The series is quite extensive and may, together with its title, be read as an overall metaphor, but there is also a recurrent sub-metaphor in several of the paintings – not least in the diptych that you call (in confrontation) – namely twigs, or branches.



NR: Well, yes, this is a clearly figurative element. What I really wanted was to visualise something broken or destroyed, something that has burst. Twigs are usually a marginal phenomenon in painting, but here I chose to let them play a more prominent part. But of course, they are representations of twigs, not real twigs!



AK: And these represented twigs tend to either hold or break…



NR: Yes. Twigs and rods have fragility inscribed into them. There is also something marginal about rods that I wanted to capture…

Yet the title (in confrontation) is about something else. The surface onto which the twigs are fastened is ‘produced’, in the old-fashioned sense of ‘being brought forward’. It is put up like a screen in front of a space, which it simultaneously conceals and enhances. In the diptych we can see glimpses, perhaps a landscape, on both sides of this surface that might also be thought of as a membrane or skin.

If instead we look at these two paintings, which I have titled (shape I) and (shape II), another aspect of the notion of ‘risk’ emerges. The thoughts I have tried to articulate in them are connected to density, to a situation where information has become very compressed and is therefore impossible to disassemble.



AK: And I suppose that is why they are monochrome? That is also a form of compression.



NR: Yes, but the reading encompasses a complication. The paintings refer to the fact that today’s world is difficult to decipher. The world no longer allows itself to be read and understood; it has become a flow of information washing over us all the time. ‘Shape’ also implies the idea of change, of ‘shape-shifting’, and of uncertainty, that we cannot know what is hiding behind a certain shape.



AK: Here, for instance, we might imagine that there are beams, constructive elements that support each other. We might also imagine that there are cuts. And then there are fields of power that are to do with the angles, the different lines you have used and their relationship to each other.



NR: Yes, and pieces also seem to have been removed from the surface. See, this lighter colour appears to be closer to us. It is almost as if something had been cut out of the surface, as if an inferior layer had emerged.



AK: But at the same time there isn’t really any foreground or background.



NR: No, not really. Everything is located on the same plane, pressing against everything else. A claustrophobic situation. It is as if body and space were mixed up and compressed into something both indeterminate and fearsome. The colours of the series have something corporeal about them, while the shapes are more like spatial constructions.

Spatiality with Coloured Walls

ANDERS KREUGER: Now we have talked about the two series that form the core of the exhibition: Regarding the Point of Restraint (2017) and Risk (2018–19). The series Not Yet Said, Not Yet Done (2008), which we talked about in the beginning, is perhaps more of a commentary to what is happening in the exhibition, just like the other works we have chosen to include: the painting The Horizontal (Heat) (2014), where realistically painted bees appear on the surface, and the series A thin white line cuts the space (2015–16), where space is dissected by a line that has no reality of its own, as when a ray of light penetrates darkness. And finally, we have the drawings that you don’t show very often. Shall we say something about them?



NINA ROOS: The drawings are what I was working on in Berlin, in 2014 and 2015. For me they are more uncomplicated than the paintings. They articulate another approach to the mental material I am working with also in the drawings, but since drawing is a quicker medium than painting they have a directness about them that is lacking in the paintings. I see the drawings as a kind of preliminary stadium.



AK: But not as preliminary studies for something to be developed in painting?



NR: No, not directly. Rather as an attempt to determine my next project in painting. Now when I look through the drawings I notice that many of them come close to the pavilion idea: spatiality with coloured walls. At the time I still had no idea I would do something similar in real life. The idea emerged in the drawings. Some of these are, from a technical point of view, actually watercolours.

For Me Colour Is Connected to Thinking

ANDERS KREUGER: Let me ask another question. What is your working process really like? I don’t want to call it heavy... But it is layered, many-faceted. It is not an easy process...



NINA ROOS: ‘Heavy’ is probably a word that describes my process correctly, although it may sound a bit depressive, which it isn’t for me. I always want to take one step further from what I did in my latest series. I also want to open up something new for myself within the rather narrow topic of painting.



AK: You don’t want to keep any crutches from earlier projects to lean on?



NR: Well, I can never entirely escape what I have done before, but I still want to find new angles, introduce new things into the process.



AK: What, for instance, is new in Risk, your most recent series?



NR: First I tried to break with the chromatic thinking of the previous series. That is what I usually do; I try to arrive at a new colour. That, in itself, is far from uncomplicated. For me colour is connected to thinking, but the colour I want to use can’t be entirely thought out.



AK: And I suppose this thinking process usually takes something like half a year for you to get through?



NR: Longer, I think, nowadays.



AK: But in this recent period, it has, nevertheless, resulted in many separate works. In the new series Risk, with the larger paintings, and Crimson (notes), with the smaller paintings, it is as if not everything must happen in the same image. As a result, the serial becomes ever more important.

NR: That is precisely why I have titled the smaller paintings (notes). They come out of a more immediate process.



AK: Yes, it is exciting to include them in the exhibition precisely because they allow us to read your intentions as a serial process: not just in each separate image but also in the passage between them, if that makes sense. I think there is also a point in showing them on a balcony where viewers will always be moving; it isn’t really possible to stand still there.



NR: The series Crimson (notes) may appear colourless, but in actual fact it is a conceptual articulation of
a ‘colour skeleton’ from which crimson has been eliminated. The first works of this series were also my first immersion into the colour reality that would also characterise the series Risk.



AK: Yes, both series feel almost like grisaille. Although they’re not grisaille!



NR: No, but they are based on the same thinking.



AK: And at the same time the totality at Lunds konsthall becomes a colour sculpture!



NR: Exactly.

On the Way to the Image

ANDERS KREUGER: A term that is often overused in texts and conversations about art – and especially when you live too close to an academic institution, which is the case in Lund, for instance – is ‘investigation’. It is often seen as a cliché and therefore edited out. But perhaps this notion can be repurposed or reconquered as we look at your paintings? What do you think, could these two new ‘monochrome’ series be seen as a kind of investigations?



NINA ROOS: Do you mean in relation to colour?



AK: No, perhaps more in relation to method, to the working process, to what they meant to you as you were making them.



NR: Yes, I guess you could. At the same time there is something I don’t like about the term ‘investigation’, and that is the implication that you would be distanced from what you are doing yourself. And then there is something instrumental about the term that I also can’t quite reconcile myself to.



AK: But if we disregard these objections and still look at how you have been working, at the process, don’t you think we could call it an investigation of the conditions you yourself have chosen to focus on?



NR: Yes, in the sense that I am trying to go all the way. How far can I go with the tasks I have given myself, with the components I work with? Ultimately it is about the function of the image. I ask myself what function the image has in painting. But I must say that I have difficulties using the term ‘image’ about what I’m doing right now. For me the function of the image is to produce meaning, but this can’t happen unless the artist has charged the image with thought-content.

For me these most recent paintings are constructions, you see. As I was working on them, there were no images before my eyes that I might have copied. I also didn’t use any digital images. My paintings right now are, instead, constructions that come into existence during my working process. My goal is never the process itself but determining a direction that leads to an image, which in turn produces meaning on different levels.



AK: So, the immediacy that is also part of the notion of image is not there in your work?



NR: Not in my most recent series. As images, they have nothing immediate about them. But since it is painting we are talking about, there are absolutely elements of immediacy in the working process, segments of the finished painting that have resulted from random events that I have chosen not to edit out. I also wish my paintings to have an immediate impact on viewers, and that the reading would follow only thereafter. The real motif has perhaps not become visible yet. That is how I think about these works.



AK: They are kind of virtual images, which might be able to exist but haven’t yet emerged? They are not yet images, is that what you mean? Then we might ask ourselves if we tend to misuse the term ‘image’.



NR: Yes, it almost feels as if Instagram and other social media have occupied the field for how ‘image’ is defined.



AK: Perhaps. As if the easy-to-read has become the image. The easy-to-forget.



NR: Exactly. As if there has to be a directly legible model of what the image is. That is what I am working against in my most recent series.



AK: Then you end up with process, and thinking, and method, and perhaps investigation, although I’m still hesitant about that term. And then this thing about being on the way… Heidegger has a text: ‘On the Way to Language’. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Perhaps your paintings are ‘on the way to the image’.

The Painted Image

NINA ROOS: The important thing for me, from the beginning, was trying to define what a painted image is. Not to illustrate a story or an object.



ANDERS KREUGER: Do you mean that there is an effort that is specific to the painted image? Autonomy is perhaps the wrong word. But that the painted image, every new image project, starts all over again each time, and is forced to find new paths?



NR: Yes, that is well put.



AK: Is that how it is for you? The painted image, you say, has been a central task or difficulty in your practice since the beginning some thirty years ago.



NR: Yes, think, for instance, of She Seemed to Be (1990). What we expect to see, the face, is gone. Instead we see the hair. And I also made some objects: a chair that was a negative chair, like a rayogram where what is really supposed to be there is gone.



AK: And then there was a period in the early-to-mid-nineties when you were working with an organic formal language?



NR: Yes, as I did in the works shown in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995.



AK: And somewhat later, in the early-to-mid-2000s, more accessible imagery suddenly snuck back in, in a new playful way, and then that also evaporated after a while, and after that there have been different waves of new tasks that you have given yourself, new thematic fields, new methods, and also new emotional states. Because when we speak about your work like this it may seem as if it is very cerebral or thought-oriented. And it is, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t also emotional layers.



NR: No, of course there are, and that is not something I try to hide, but my work is not about trying to highlight different emotions.



AK: No, but they emerge later, in the elaborated result.



NR: In the elaborated result, yes. I don’t suppress or censor these things; they are there.



AK: And there are very different emotional pitches in your different series.



NR: Absolutely. The emotional aspect of painting is part of pictorial language. Of course, I ask myself what painting is today. For me it feels like an impossibility to engage with a medium without analysing what conditions it. All artistic media have their limitations and possibilities. What I find interesting about painting is that there is something ephemeral about the process itself. You have to be totally present and on-site to be able to grasp what is in the air, otherwise it is gone the next day. You can never go back to something that was in the air at an earlier point!



AK: But that’s also true about the viewers. They really had to come to Lunds konsthall. It was not enough to look at installation images. This is important with all exhibitions, but not least with this one.