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Martti Jämsä, dalla serie Summertime, 1996, courtesy Galleria Heino Helsinki Cold Horizons 
9 photographic talents from the Nordic countries of Europe 
videoprojection by Stella Lombardo e Cristina Piccardo
presentation by Ferruccio Giromini 
Musei di Nervi, Raccolte Frugone, Villa Grimaldi Fassio, Via Capolungo 9, Genova Nervi
7 Marzo/26 Aprile 2009 

 

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Dag Alveng (Norway)
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Soffía Gísladóttir (Iceland)
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Martti Jämsä (Finland) Courtesy Galleria Heino, Helsinki

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Adam Jeppesen (Denmark)

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Gerry Johansson (Sweden)

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Maria Kjartansdóttir (Iceland)
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Jeanette Land Schou (Denmark)
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Susanna Majuri (Finland) Courtesy Galerie Adler, Frankfurt
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Herdis Maria Siegert (Norway)

                   

                    AN EYE ON THE NORTH 

Generally speaking the painted landscape allows the creative freedom of the artist a certain amount of space, and indeed any painted natural environment can easily be idealised. Its realistic quality can be transcended by the personality of the artist who has decided to address it and perhaps to modify it in more or less imperceptible details at his own pleasure. Its lights, its presences, all its component parts can be subjected to even significant variations: there is no one to check up, what is important is the end result.

 

The same cannot be said of the photographed landscape. Its greater dependence on reality is intuitive and self-evident – its realistic basis is registered photographically, without any short cuts. And although this has become objectively less true, in the absolute sense, in the last few years, in a climate dominated by the digital touching up of photographs, it is a position that still remains fairly believable and widespread. Today, those who are serious about taking photographs, and for whom it is more than a passing recreation, are faithful to a conception of photography which is in some ways restrictive, following humbly in the path of past artists who did not have at their disposal – nor felt the need for – the thousand possibilities that exist today for correcting and radically changing that rectangle of reality mechanically captured by the camera lens in a fraction of a second.

 

So in general terms the relationship between the natural environment and the photographer is different from that between the natural environment and the painter. In the one case the creativity of the modifier is allowed to prevail; in the other, what tends to prevail is the “servant’s” faithfulness to reality. And, nota bene, this is not to establish lists of merit or absolute values: it is only to point out the existence of two attitudes that are similar but different – more cousins than brothers, so to speak.

 

And since the landscape of the third millennium – more than ever in the wastelands of Europe – appears everywhere to be severely polluted by human presence, it is perhaps interesting to try and identify another “sense of landscape” where the natural environment largely manages to resist transformation by human activity:

in other words in the lands of the north, where rigid temperatures discourage dense settlement, at least for most of the year. So not absolutely virgin territory – but areas where the insidious insistence of the human parasite has had little effect.

 

Taking our cue from an important exhibition entitled Nordic Moods - Landscape Photography of Our Time, held in the summer of 2008 at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, which allowed the visitor to discover some real treasures of contemporary landscape art, we were prompted to search for some talented photographers (from different generations) who would be able to restore to us the sense of subdued excitement stimulated by the open and winding panoramas of the north (to which we, the people of the Mediterranean, are perhaps more susceptible than other continental Europeans) as we moved up towards the bewitching rarefaction of the arctic zones.

 

First we were captivated by the young but justly famous Susanna Majuri (1978), an outstanding artist with the unsuspected gifts of a frosty witch whose mysterious water games forced us into immediate surrender. Then another Finnish gaze fascinated us: Martti Jämsä (1959) opens his eyes wide to freeze the childlike slowing-down of time in the great void – down below the void of water and up above the void of air – in a sort of mystic pantheism unknown in our more crowded climes. But there are multiple Nordic realities that are alien to our southern ways of life, and hence all the more than worthy of our curiosity. We could start from the ground zero of the images offered by Norway’s Herdis Maria Siegert (1955), who takes us back to the beginning of the week of creation, when the waters were parted and turned to ice, which in turn became the paradoxical design, despite its immobile appearance, of a first abstract presage of a future life. Her fellow-countryman Dag Alveng (1953), on the other hand, takes us by the hand through the warm trembling summer light of his garden, in an unexpected, even somewhat sleepy, holiday atmosphere. The Dane Adam Jeppesen (1978) prefers the night, as long as it is not freezing, but he explores its shadows as if in search of trolls, unsteady amidst tremors and enchantments.  Sweden offer us both Gerry Johansson’s (1945) tree trunks, presences with thick skins, immobile but living (and perhaps seeing us as too mobile), and Jeanette Land Schou’s (1958) slow mists, which distend damply and inexorably in empty parks and along frighteningly silent streets, swelling their cohorts of persistent dew. And we sail on to distant Iceland, which Soffía Gísladóttir (1974) opens up to reveal the almost violent immediacy of elementary nature, between flowering meadows and bare, bleak mountains; and it is to the peaks of Iceland that we are borne in flight by the refreshing vision of Maria Kjartansdóttir (1980); here we can breathe the rarefied air, taste the silences of the snow, dialogue with polar winds and touch the creaking of the ice.

 

 In conclusion, once again we have confirmation that there is something typical about the gaze of the landscape artist: it looks far into the distance and is still, essentially horizontal and wide-angled; it serves truth less than imagination; it is not out of focus; also it humbly serves not only itself but those who will use it after him,
who will come to know that vision after him and with him (or indeed her, seeing that most of these artists are women).                                                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                         
   Ferruccio Giromini 
(Translation by Ian Harvey)
 
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