A Democratic Aristocracy - Trudi Jaeger’s Paintings and Drawings
Trudi Jaeger’s artistic project has followed a steady but not unwavering course for over 15 years. She has been loyal to an artistic expression which, in its simplicity, is open and vulnerable to the viewer’s interpretations, judgement and potential rejection.
Jaeger’s many paintings and drawings are mainly in the same aesthetic register; simple lines of different dark tones on light backgrounds, in formats that relate to the artist’s body. Her art is an extended meditation over surfaces, lines, form, colour, light and rhythm, and their possibilities within a basic human framework.
Illuminations
As the title indicates, Illuminations is linked to light - its role in creating insight and in how it enables a picture to appear before us. The title is also a direct reference to one of Jaeger’s many artistic sources of inspiration, Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations, a collection of prose poems written between 1873 and 1875 (but first published in 1886). This work is today recognised as an illuminating example of an artist’s inspired view of the world, the visions of a gifted and sensitive young man barely twenty years old. The poems in Les Illuminations were the last Rimbaud wrote; they were his farewell to poetry. On the title page we see a picture drawn by Rimbaud himself, as he follows the tradition of poets illustrating their own work. In the same way, the poems themselves exemplify a self-defined and self-contained art which is sufficient unto itself.
Rimbaud's prose poems seem to be laden with meaning when we firstly encounter them, but a closer reading clearly reveals they have no explicit narrative or conventional coherence. Instead, they follow the principles of suggestion, sound and dreamlike visions that would be followed by the symbolist poets and open the way for surrealism. Rimbaud’s uncompromising approach to his art would make him the patron saint of modernist poetry. We can see why this is if we consider the first lines of After the Flood, the poem that opens most editions of Les Illuminations:
No sooner had the notion of the Flood regained its composure, than a hare paused amid the gorse and trembling bellflowers and said its prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web.
Oh, the precious stones that were hiding, –the flowers that were already peeking out.
Stalls were erected in the dirty main street, and boats were towed toward the sea, which rose in layers above as in old engravings.
(Retold by John Ashbery.)
…
The language is full of striking, enigmatic and powerful images that are neither introduced nor explained. They just ooze out of the text, and appear to have no place to go without the help of the reader. This would seem to have little in common with Trudi Jaeger’s simple, sometimes almost formalistic, investigations of surface, form, colour, light and rhythm. However, we find similarities in the ways in which these two artists engage with the public. They share a ‘remote openness’. On the one hand, they are almost aloof, saying nothing about themselves and their own experiments and endeavours. But at the same time their art is fully accessible; the public needs no previous knowledge or education to interpret it or find meaning.
A space for the imagination
Central to Jaeger's project is her wish to create an open space for the public to relate to her art. In this endeavour, the openness of the works themselves naturally plays an essential role, but almost as important is the role played by the exhibition context. Jaeger has in recent years been interested in modernism's architectonic master, Le Corbusier, and his efforts to create buildings that satisfy basic human needs, work that resulted in Le Petit Cabanon, a tiny dwelling that provided for our fundamental needs. When we find ourselves in such a calming minimalist architectural context, it is possible that we feel a deeper ‘presence’ and a more profound consciousness of our surroundings. Jaeger wants to explore how such an ambience might be brought into the exhibition space.
For the exhibition at the Kabuso Arts Centre, a gallery she knows well, Jaeger has extended the notion of a free space by creating a space (an area in the exhibition) where the onlooker can disengage. Her phenomenologically inspired approach to art emphasises that the world does not appear in front of us, but that we are thrown into it, completely submerged in its materiality, without any real possibility of fixing its limits from our experience of it and our interaction with it. The creation of a free space in order to see, create and reflect over works of art recognises this. It is hoped that such a space will bring about both reality-orientated insights and insights that arise from subjective interpretation and the imagination.
Jaeger’s paintings and drawings are made by brush. However, her brushstrokes are applied to different surfaces; the paintings on canvas, and the drawings, on paper. The surfaces are minutely examined before being transformed by the nuances of the brush. The sparse elements of the compositions – a few strokes, a minimal palette – contribute to the intensity of meaning linked to all parts, and the surface material participates powerfully in the interaction between form, colour and expression, silently strengthening the works’ inherent logic. Jaeger often employs white and other colours that are lighter than the off-white and greying tones of canvas and paper, thus further emphasising the presence of the surfaces she is working on. This attention to the interaction between her materials mirrors Jaeger’s interest in the expressions found in nature, such as the juxtapositions of a landscape’s topography, flora and light.
Jaeger’s art has always been characterised by a close dialogue with nature. From her impressionistic student works that express her overwhelming encounter with the mountains of Norway to later journeys in more or less cultivated landscapes, from Roman parks to volcanic islands, her work has taken a more expressionistic but, at the same time, a more restrained direction. Her dialogue with nature employs an extended range of visual, literary, musical, botanical and geographical references that influence and form her creative process.
In the time prior to this exhibition, Jaeger has travelled to places such as La Côte Sauvage in Brittany and the Nordhordland heathlands outside Bergen. These are west-facing coastal terrains that respectively face the Atlantic and the North Sea. In these landscapes, liminal spaces between sea and land, she has studied the flora and the ways in which it adapts to its surroundings, and the relationships between the plants’ textures and the play of light between sky, sea and land. In this play of light, it is the gradual familiarization to the quality of different colours, from one’s initial impressions of their darkness to a later appreciation of their deeper hues, that Jaeger expresses again and again in her many variations on her basic leitmotif: the journey of the line over the empty canvas.
Process, layers, time
Trudi Jaeger has created a long series of works where she explores visual vocabularies and their related colour palettes. This high level of productivity is closely connected to both the internal relations between the works and the process-orientated nature of her practice. We find similar processes in the world of music, where well-prepared improvisation on folk or classical themes has ensured the survival and renewal of tradition.
Jaeger’s work is characterised by serialism, repetitions of starting positions. This approach is inspired by calligraphy and other, corporal gestures. This leads to a slow development where repetition steadily brings about new forms and expression, and where the similarities between the many different images underline the elements that divide them and give each its identity. These images are truly, for all their simplicity, very different in character. Jaeger’s artistic language constantly renews itself, drawing upon fresh impulses from visual and philosophical sources.
We see this quality in the way in which Jaeger works and presents her drawings. For many years she has shown them on a specially-made structures, tables on which drawings are placed on top of each other. The paper’s translucency allows parts of the underlying layers to be seen. This layered organisation is analogous to the way in which shellfish grow, new layers that signal the course of time slowly being added to their shells. Jaeger has also developed another presentation form, one which clearly shows the processual character of her drawing. In a silent choreography she lifts drawings from one table to another, thereby demonstrating the serial nature of her artistic process.
We clearly see how qualities such as space and silence change from picture to picture, and how different intervals and pauses manifest themselves. Our attention is drawn to the ever-changing intensity of the form and the various ways in which the colours play with the background. However, this is not a simple, progressive serialism that just adds a little here or takes away a little there, as we find in minimalism. Instead, every single creative expression, whether it be a repetition or a break, is genuinely unique, and we are reminded of artists such as Brice Marden, Joan Mitchell or Cy Twombly, all of whom have inspired Jaeger.
Jaeger’s work has in recent years been shaped by repetition. This is not a repetition that just replicates the same process again and again, but a creative tool for developing new expressions that can capture and shed light on the aspects of reality which she wants to draw our attention to.
An aristocratic openness
Jaeger’s work has an aristocratic openness whose only demand on the public is that they show interest and attention. This demand is both exclusionary and inclusive. By working with an expression that does not require onlookers to have any prior knowledge or conceptual alliance with the artist, she creates radically open art. Her work can be interpreted in many different ways, even though some viewers may not find any ambiguity.
Each piece of work is a fresh exploration of relations between surface, brushstroke, form, colour, light and rhythm. Basic forms of repetition make change gradually visible. This exploration is fascinating, and shows an extremely impressive and assured aesthetic, even though at first sight there is nothing more to extract from the works than that which is shown on the surface. This might sound like sour-minded criticism, but in reality it only confirms what Jaeger’s art is all about.
The fact that Trudi Jaeger draws inspiration from nature’s richly abundant reservoir of impressions or from experiences of a more or less private nature, does nothing to diminish such an evaluation. This is information that is of interest to a curious viewer. However, if we have not been to Britanny or the Nordhordaland heathlands it is difficult to know how information about these sources of inspiration might help us, other than to assure us there is ‘something’ behind her colours and forms. Here we find one of abstract art’s most aristocratic qualities; its absolute demand that spectators accept that what is before them has an intrinsic interest, and that it must be accepted on its own terms.
At the same time, Jaeger wants to create a space for the public, in order that they may have room and freedom to explore the interpretive role that her art forces them to adopt. It is here that we find one of Jaeger’s most open and caring gestures towards her public: the fact that she does not force spectators into a fixed position, but gives them room to feel and think, brings about a radical equality in the relationship between the artist and her public. And when this is done in a way that requires no form of repayment in the form of a contribution to the exhibition, as we see in so many other public-orientated projects, we see that Jaeger has really helped to create a framework in which spectators, as long as they are interested, can engage with her art in the most fruitful of ways.
In all of her aesthetic references and preferences, Trudi Jaeger demonstrates that she bears further the late modernist tradition in painting. However, her poetic and aesthetic expression is so alluring that it can hardly be accused of having any of modernism’s exaggerated rigour. Her aristocratic stance shows itself first and foremost in her egalitarian approach towards the viewer.
The text was written in connection with the Quartus Illuminations - Atlas Littoralis exhibition at Kunsthuset Kabuso, 14 April–20 May, 2018.
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Kristoffer Jul-Larsen (born 1981) is a literary scholar and senior lecturer in Norwegian at Western Norwegian University of Applied Sciences. He also works as a reviewer for Kunstkritikk.no in Bergen. Jul-Larsen researches how literature is reviewed and promoted on radio, and has published articles and reviews in publications such as Vagant, Syn og Segn, Billedkunst, Klassekampen, Bergens Tidende and Agora. He was formerly on the editorial board of Fett.
Translated by David Glass.