Where Did All the Flowers Go?
Review by Øystein Hauge (translated from Norwegian with ChatGPT).
The Old-fashioned as a Problem and an Opportunity
When one of the world’s leading art museums planned a retrospective exhibition of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944, known for his highly simplified compositions of red, yellow, and blue squares), the art experts chose to completely ignore the painter’s naturalistic flower paintings from the period before he became intellectually inaccessible. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York, only one question remained for painting to answer in 1995: What is a painting?
In Mondrian’s rectangles and squares, one found a quality that nature's representation in art had hidden for centuries. The vertical and horizontal lines essentially communicated and coordinated all fundamental human experiences. Heaven and earth, high and low, morality, logic, religion, etc.
Ten years have passed. To paint or not to paint is still a question in the art scene. No matter what the artist might apply to their canvases, everything seems equally traditional and old-fashioned. What now keeps the painterly project alive? The experienced Bergen artist Lillian Presthus moves from the abstract to the figurative, as if searching for Mondrian’s flowers. This heroic mission is soberly presented on gallery walls that precisely give the old-fashioned aspects of her new paintings very special opportunities.
Everyone can see that Presthus's painterly applications of patterned wallpapers, album pictures, and "good girls" tell us something about femininity and socialization, about losing oneself to find oneself, about the individual’s vulnerability during upbringing. However, unlike contemporary artists who work with related issues (such as Swedish Lena Cronqvist and South African Marlene Dumas), it becomes harder to confuse Presthus’s paintings with so-called stories from reality. These paintings never become provocative. The sense of something critically investigative usually appears indirectly, hidden as "fragments of a background tapestry," to use the artist's own words about her unique method. An interesting strategy.
“Mønsterpiken” ("The Pattern Girl") is a central motif. Doll-like girls who, in some paintings, "stand out" from the background of the painting and at other times disappear into it. This formally precise painterly movement gives us an intuitive yet clear understanding of the artist’s intentions. And here is more: The new paintings by Lillian Presthus suggest that painting is once again allowed to be multiple things at once. It can be both transparent and dense, mythically narrative and concretely repetitive. The question of what the artist does when she paints becomes less interesting than why she does it and how. Although she may not share Mondrian's belief that painting alone can change the moral conditions of human life, she still holds firmly to painting’s possibilities as a bridge builder - between depth and surface, myth and reality.
REVIEWED BY ØYSTEIN HAUGE
