Andreas Siqueland: A Place for Painting
Research Fellow at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Faculty of Visual Arts
As a research affiliate at KHiO, I will work with painting. Using this traditional medium, I am attempting to develop a new language in order to address the relationship between place and painting.
Starting with my own practice, I would like to open up a dialogue with others about where the place for painting is or could be today. The project will be divided in work situated between studio practice and a series of travels and end up in an exhibition with a catalogue.
The starting point for my research is a contemporary understanding of painting that has its roots in Romanticism and runs to the present. I think that painting continuously maintains the possibility to open up new worlds and new ways of seeing despite many attempts to write it off as insignificant. After a neoconceptual wave concerned with social relational practices, painting is still a place of contemporary art practice. Starting with this perspective, I would like to ask what makes this place different from the painting that was made forty years ago or even earlier, and how do we relate to painting as a medium today?
The object of inspection is my own artistic production. Through a series of travels I would like to investigate different places through painting. The goal however is not in documentation per se, but a utopian endeavor to find the place of painting itself. The travels will entail a series of meetings, interviews and discussion about the position and possibilities of painting today.
During my undergraduate studies painting was the main focus. I have a classic figurative background based on observation – photographic and from life. My paintings are often developed in series and based around a specific theme, relating to the place of production or the place of exhibition. The dichotomy between these two places, is the point of departure for my research which is aiming to locate the place for painting itself.
For the past five years I have mainly dedicated my artistic practice to the on-going collaborative project aiPotu with the artist Anders Kjellesvik (N). Taking its name from the inversion of Utopia, the work is focused on making site-specific interventions, actions and events, often related to the public space.
My work with aiPotu has close ties with my painting practice. I understand painting as a utopian practice; a description, a search for a non-place. The fall of Modernism marked also the fall of utopian thinking. We have used the last forty years to pick up the pieces left after Modernism and through this process we are making a new story while at the same time reliving the past. The idea of the fragment links back to Romanticism as the site of loss and longing, a nostalgic, melancholic pursuit. However with distance, this act of piecing together also invites and elicits humor and irony. The revival of painting is a revival of a new type of utopian thinking; a new way to piece together the world and to think about how it is perceived and /or dream about how it could be. Finding this place is the agenda of my research.