NINA ROOS

There is an astonishing continuity in Nina Roos’ painting. In the early works on zinc sheet from 1990 right up to today’s painting in the classic oil-on-canvas format, the same light shines – softly – and there is a darkness that breathes. The paintings seem to come from the same interior place, and to find their own form in the same situation. Of course, by ‘place’ here I mean a place within the artist herself. Many artists, and not least painters, talk about this. It is not until they have found their way into this place again that the painting comes. One calls it “following the voice”, another “finding the right note”. Roos herself described it during the early 90s as getting the taste of a Marianne toffee.

Sometimes, this place is called intuition, or inspiration. These are not really the same thing. Intuition is a kind of inner knowledge, whose causes are hidden. Inspiration comes from outside, which is what the word means – something that is not the artist herself breathes through her. To be inspired can be described as “following the voice”, going along with something that is not the normally functioning, rational self.

For Nina Roos this place is wordless, but not languageless. The pictures take place. Slowly, over time, the viewer can follow them into this space.

But within this continuity great changes occur over time.

A peculiarity of painting on zinc sheet is that you cannot make changes. We might say that painting on zinc prompts a concentrated form, a detail or a situation. Hanging in my home is a zinc painting by Roos from 1989, Senta. The square, 125 × 125 cm surface is covered with a paint that looks like a soft, greyish/brown grain. It is a living thing, perhaps a very large tree. We see it only in a circular opening in the middle of the painting, a hole in the varnish. Using this simple method Roos opens up the painting, so that something is hidden, and something else is suddenly exposed, becomes naked. Over the years, and above all in her painting of recent years, Roos uses this drama to show fissures in an otherwise closed-off reality.

In Tycktes hon vara (Seemed she to be) from 1990 we see the first of Roos’ averted figures. Two heads turned away from us, with gleaming, thick, curly hair, painted in as much detail as the angels’ hair in Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece; two vibrating movements, like sound waves. The four little paintings suggest a situation, an experience, of which the viewer becomes a witness, while perhaps being personally unable to understand it. This is another set of problems that will recur in Roos’ painting. How do you give visible form to an experience? Can it be given form? Ludwig Wittgenstein devotes hundreds of paragraphs in Philosophical Investigations to understanding how someone can communicate a feeling, for example, pain. Is it enough to say “I am in pain”? Obviously not. This is a neutral phrase that in no way conveys the intensity of the experience. Wittgenstein can come to no conclusion. The final thirty pages of Philosophical Investigations were to be his last.

Is it possible to show experience in a picture? The Theosophist Annie Besant thought she could see thoughts, that thoughts have a certain form, just as feelings have a form. Thought-forms (1901), with its fantastic images of complex feelings, was to be an important source of inspiration for early abstract modernism. For some years, Roos also paints strange paintings reminiscent of Thought-forms. She calls them Handens känsla, Den violetta färgen (Touch in the Hands. The Violet colour. 1991).

In 1992–93, these thought-forms were expanded to include space. At this same time, Roos switches to painting on acrylic glass. The change of technique gives her several advantages. The pictures can be larger, and more complex. They integrate themselves into the room in a different way. The colours are clearer, purer and softer. The transparency of the ground is able to interact with opaque layers of paint. The inner space in the painting can give back a strange echo or serve as an antithesis to the three-dimensional space in which the pictures are being shown. Roos often works with diptychs, almost making mirror images, but not really (Utan titel [Untitled], 1994). Figures in paint that are both intense and slightly attenuated cover the acrylic glass. The same figure as Roos painted in Handens känsla III (Touch in the Hands III.) is enlarged and intensified in Utan titel (Untitled) 1993.

Roos paints these large soft, sensual, sensitive abstract paintings up until 1997, although I am not entirely sure that the term ‘abstract’ is correct here. Her visual world resounds with soft yellows, pinks, violets. Sometimes, the colour is made deeper to produce an incision, sometimes it flows out to become a nebula. Look- ing at the paintings is like slipping into something soft and physical, perhaps behind a membrane, into something lukewarm and smooth that can suddenly acquire the slight tang of a more bitter taste.

In 2000, Roos begins to introduce human figures into her painting. In the three- part public work Lost in Yellow she is fascinated by shadow and counterlight, and has the silhouette of a motorcyclist interact with the surroundings in the Vuosaari district of Helsinki. Again, the figure allows Roos to show the difference between the space she creates and the space that surrounds us.

In the Scenarios series from that same year Roos works with complex visual worlds, in which cars and splashing paint bring movement into the painting. The sketchily drawn, superimposed human figures are actors on equal terms with a shower of paint. Here, and even more in the Rotation series from 2001, she also begins to work with a soft shadowing, a kind of veil-like attenuation of colour in soft brown or grey over the entire picture surface. The picture is toned. Some years later, it is this resonance, this tonality, that carries the whole painting.

Here, then, is the tinting. A human figure, lightly traced in white, in motion, if not violent then at least energetic. And then a picture on the figure’s sweater, painted clearly (Chair, Fantasy of Escape, Crowd). The garish sweater motif seems to dictate the person’s movement, instead of vice versa.

In 2002–2003, Nina Roos’ space is brown. The colours become like a taste on the tongue, a purely sensual experience in which the senses are interchanged. There is an erotic undertone to the Habit Suddenly Broken series, with its leaf- like paint formations, shining, against a dark-copper or shimmering-gold background. Roos uses the whole of her painterly register when she paints these shifts of painted light, which more than anything else show the fantastic ability of oil paint to absorb and render light. Think of the velvet lustre of the fabrics in paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries, of the fur trimmings, the fleshy pulp of a peach!

In 2003, in the four-part series Introduction to a Place: Picture Track. No. 1 the brown is toned down to a shade deeper than the bricks in the wall that Roos paints as the picture’s middle ground. If Utan titel (Untitled) from Habit suddenly broken is played out in a soft, undefined interior, we have now moved to a darker, more austere place. If we are out of doors, we have little room to move. There is hardly any atmospheric space any longer. Roos will continue to use the wall with its potential for shutting things out, and for partitioning the picture plane. Here, she has drawn the face and right shoulder of an androgynous figure, in front of the wall, but also a part of the wall. Something hangs down in the picture’s upper margins, something black that might be plants, but which looks like black, menacing tentacles. The figure is looking over its shoulder at something that the viewer cannot see.

And then, in 2004, Roos’ paintings shimmer in a seductive orgy of colour. In the four-part Location of Surprise and Perplexity through Fragonard the brown has to move a little to make way for a fantastic cloud painting in soft yellow, with a little light blue and light red, or storms in cascades like a tropical tempest raging over a creature crouching under the masses of paint. The Fragonard of the title leads our thoughts to the French 18th-century painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and perhaps above all to his The Swing (1767), in which a girl dressed all in pink swings in a light-filled hollow amid the dense foliage of the trees that surround her. Roos uses Fragonard’s dynamic picture space, but puts in her own themes.

In 2007, Roos paints two square pictures in which a densely grey-painted fence takes up two thirds of the picture surface. Above the fence we see the backs of two animals. One appears to be a horse, the other possibly a tiger. (I Zoo I, II [In the Zoo I, II]) They are hyper-realistically rendered, and for that very reason are all the more enigmatic. The fence blocks our gaze. At the same time, we can almost touch the animal, feel its warmth and physical massiveness. The paintings are compactly physical. But even of this world, in which we feel at home, we see only just as much as the artist wants us to see.

Two other paintings from the same time (2007–2008) show a wall of lightcoloured wood. In a gap in the wall we see details of two/three men in dark and light shirts – hands, part of an arm, a shoulder. If we had any specific expectations as to what lies behind the fence that ‘blocks’ our seeing the whole thing, we can know very little about what is going on behind these light-coloured wooden walls (from Positions and Reversals I, IX).

In general, Roos’ painting from these years is preoccupied with having the illusion block out some of what is happening in the paintings. A dark, dramatic painting of a pot containing a leafy plant shows in its foreground a hand that is either taking away or adding a white fleck – an almost over-explicit, self-referential painterly gesture (Tuggummi [Hand and Chewing Gum], 2007). Two baskets of apples (Positions and Reversals V) look as though they have been taken from a black-and-white photographic negative, and transposed to painting. Fragments of a door panel break through a white surface, contrasting with a dark-brown-vi- olet space-creating element. (Not yet said, Not yet done, 2007–08). This is an almost Brechtian way of shattering the illusion of the painting. In Figur framför grå målning (A Person in front of a Grey Painting), the motif is a figure in a grey sweater with a hole in one arm. The light-coloured skin shines through a loose lattice-work of threads. It is as though we were given X-ray vision via the artist’s gaze, allowing us to see what is hidden. The lattice-work effect is repeated on a large scale in Hytten (Cabin). Through a wall, perforated by even rows of holes, we glimpse a blond boy with blue eyes, the palm of his hand half-open, and behind him the bracing waves of the blue sea. Here the wall becomes like an element for disturbing the gaze, almost like a trompe-l’oeil painting. By playing with and directing our expectations the artist causes the viewer’s gaze to linger. We stay inside the picture long enough to see something else, something hidden.

A strange little painting from 2008 again shows a white-painted surface. But in this one a round hole opens up, and we can see what is happening behind the wall. There sits a little man, talking through another wall – we see it in cross-section, with a figure, her ear pressed firmly against the wall, listening on the other side. She is looking at us, and yet not – she is only an ear. (Observationer (den andra sidan II) [Observations (the other side II)]).

In a way, I believe this is a key painting in terms of what Roos is seeing and giving visual form to during this period. The man talking to the wall gets no reply. He simply has to trust that someone is listening. The girl who is listening cannot speak. She is dependent on hearing what he says in order to be able to understand and form a conception of existence for herself. In an act of generosity, the artist has shown us what painting is also about, perhaps in response to Wittgenstein’s questions about how we can know that someone else understands our pain. Someone else does indeed understand, but we can never get any proof. We have to trust that someone is there and listening, someone we cannot see.

And then come all the transcendental pallet and cardboard-box paintings. Simple objects, details in an interior – a shelf with a toffee wrapper, some piled-up card- board boxes, a pallet – bathing in a clarified light. These are pictures of the miracle that we live and see, and, when it goes even further, into meditative looking, that seeing transforms the things of everyday life. Here Roos becomes for me a mystic, a mystic of everyday light, who like Edith Södergran sees that the key to all the secrets lies in the grass by the raspberry patch. Living itself is the mystery.

And here, with the mystical space as her starting point, Roos carries on investigating states of emotion, like the soft mountain ranges traced in the sofa, Passage I (everything has changed), 2009, in which the transformation seems to happen specifically in the crease between the two sofa cushions, or in the shadow paintings from 2010, which for me begin with Passage V (integration of shadows) from the year before, in which we see a dark-framed portion of someone who may be lying in a bed. This portion is surrounded by a white field with the insubstantial shadow of a light construction.

The Shades series shows rooms in which the fabrics, the curtain, cushions, come to bear intense moments of feeling, something we all recognize: while the emotional tumult rages within me, I stare at the curtain, and the curtain somehow gets to bear the insupportable, and does so by continuing to exist until the insupportable can again be lived with. Here, Roos also has the titles form yet another layer, a kind of defining format that the painting thus avoids. I am thinking in particular of Shades VIII (moment of madness). It may well be that this draped cloth is a curtain, but it is also the image of gleaming-white anxiety that paradox- ically enough also protects me from having to see. Or take Shades I (I am here), with its pile of bedclothes like an island of security, away from the alarming tumult that seems to be going on in the lower regions (we see it through a trapdoor in the picture). Or Shades VI (without protection), in which the walls and floor seem to be made of glass.

The whole of this extraordinary pictorial world with its rich visual language has come from the same place, the place that Gunnar Ekelöf was referring to when he wrote: “I live in another world, but you live in it too.”