Figures of Beauty and holocoust

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth V:5

Many of Gry Hege Rinaldo's painted figures are Pompeian in attitude. The city engulfed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 gave its inhabitants so little warning that the bodies were frozen to that moment of holocaust. A sacrifice where the victim is engulfed in fire is the true origin of the word holocaust, from the Greek holokaustora, via hanstos - meaning burnt (*i)

The passive and lifeless poses of Rinaldo's female nudes call up two initial responses. An aesthetic pleasure, due to technical expertise, is combined with the disconcerting unease of viewing lifeless human bodies. Rinaldo's drawings and paintings exhibit a smooth, clean analysis of form and this is not something one expects when viewing the female body in art. Psychologically and sociologically we still have a series of traditions associated with the painted female nude in oil on canvas. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the female form should contain the promise of a fertile place; it is an icon of sensual fullness often combined with beauty. To intentionally use parts of the female form to disappoint these expectations contradicts a norm of art history. What does Rinaldo want to replace fertility and sensuousness with? Why is she attempting to disrupt a traditional mode of expression?

Amongst many young contemporary European artists there is a belief that too much art history & theory can become a burden rather than help. Art academy now trains its students so well in history and aesthetic theory that this can prove troublesome to those wishing to use traditional media and content. A library of previous examples fills the brain; one must simultaneously join a tradition and try to extend it. During the last century the traditional media's of drawing and painting laboured under the masculine iconography of virgins and Venus's, femme fatales, vampires and Lolitas, mothers and whores. Today, a solution for many artists is to focus on small new areas of progress, often based on immediate bodily experience. This also helps to restore a sense of self in an increasingly anonymous culture.

My room is so delicious after a whole day outside, it seems to me that I am
not myself except in my room. Gwen John

Gwen John 1876-1939 wrote this to her colleague and lover, Rodin, during a period in Paris. Like Gry Hege Rinaldo, Gwen John studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1895-1898). Drawing at the Slade, far from being the laborious recording of form with light and shadow, has always been taught as a language in its own right. There are several comparisons to be made between Gwen John and Rinaldo, both artists repeat a subject without allowing it to diminish and both use the drawing as a vital stage in producing an oil painting. But most importantly, Gwen John's use of "my room" is a key to her art. The chaos of nature is not allowed in, her pictures are quiet domestic interiors that are utterly feminine and not dictated to by the male gaze (as they are in, for example, Degas' interiors). Rinaldo's work goes one step further; the artist takes away the interior from her compositions.
Her drawings and paintings do not describe a specific space or room, the backgrounds and foregrounds of these works are anonymous. Similarly the bodies often lack faces and thus identity. In an attempt to hold a distance between the body and the specifics of personality, the artist cuts and edits the compositions to exclude facial expressions. Painting heads against a strong light is an effective wav of nhlitPratina detail and nlavino down identity These unspecified rooms containing an anonymous woman refute the personal, the erotic, and try to refute the dramatic.

Gry Hege Rinaldo's working process is very meticulous. She begins with photography, often photographing herself in the appropriate pose. Extracts from the photos are then drawn on paper, and finally the drawing is transferred to the larger canvas using oil. The translation
of the motive from one media to the next is a conscious methodology to achieve a truly twodimensional equivalent to the model. The artist wishes to create a picture that is flat and colourless, not physically, but psychologically. The muted colour and the attention to the drawn line (the silhouette of the female form); all produce a dampening effect. The life in each painted body is deprived of a pulse through subdued colour and accentuated line.
The reclining position of the model reminds the observer of an operating table, or even the anatomy classes still available at the Slade. In some drawings the extended neck muscles and the tilt of the head backward suggest the body after death, of a time when an uncomfortable pose has little meaning. The mortuary with dissecting table is not normally considered a place of beauty, so why are these paintings and drawings so aesthetically appealing? There are several factors that enhance the beauty of these compositions.
Both drawings and paintings contain astute attention to the intimate organic patterns on
the surface of the body. These details are accentuated by a dramatic lighting, somewhat baroque, that heightens the sense of a frozen moment supremely captured. Indeed the fact that Gry Hege Rinaldo looks so closely produces the impression of meditated beauty;

But who looks? If people could see,
and see properly, and see whole,
they would all be painters.
And its because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

Bonnard(*ii)

The dramatic lighting makes a tableau
vivant (*iii) of each scene and, perhaps subconsciously, influences our interpretation of these pictures.

Light acts as a symbol of enlightenment, or insight; thus the lifeless recumbent figure may be bathed in a redemptive radiance. This is similar to the lighting of the recumbent Christ in many renaissance depictions of the entombment. Perhaps a crucial question when one sees Rinaldo's pictures is - how does the viewer interpret the baroque shower of light? Is this the light of obliteration (holocaust) or is this a redemptive light? If the answer is too clear, then the work has failed; such universal imagery should call to mind contrasting memories both from art and real life.

The strength of these pictures is the psychological depiction of the victim. If nothing else, she is a passive victim for our prying eyes. Whatever she awaits, be it holocaust or enlightenment, these pictures are metaphors of a universal state of mind: that of lifeless stagnation. A state of total inactivity rendered by compositional balance. If the mummified corpses of Pompeii reveal the instant before a natural holocaust, there may well be an element of peace and stillness in the victim's body language; the still before a storm. Similarly, Rinaldo's figures contain little drama and no rage at the injustice of being a victim.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn
and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas (1914-53)

There is no rage in these works of art, with assured technical excellence this young artist portrays the psychological status of cessation, of complete physical and mental stillness. After all, rage and sorrow naturally begin after a holocaust.

i) The mass murder of Jews by the Nazis during World War ll is a proper noun, spelt with a capital; Holocaust.
ii) Bonnard gave up photography due to" the tyranny of the single viewpoint". He failed to encapsulate both figure and room when resticted to the camera as a starting point
iii) Theatrical term denoting a moment or scene in which the action is 'frozen' for dramatic effect.

Pitched Past Pitch Of Grief…

“I wish I hadn`t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I
shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!”
Lewis Carroll, “Alice in Wonderland”

Modern psychoanalytic theory suggests that we are, to a large extent, creatures of parts. The
fundamental mechanisms underpinning human modes of relating are informed by
“phantasies”- phantasy being a (largely unconscious) kind of thinking that exists on the
frontier between the physical and the psychical. Prototypical phantasies based on feeding,
swallowing, ingestion (introjection) from the other, and expulsion, giving or forcing into the
other (projection) can be detected at the most obvious and everyday level in the words and
phrases we use to describe how we feel about ourselves and others. These phantasies are
peculiarly evident in the language of lovers – primitive ideas about cannibalistic
incorporation (“I could just eat you up”), fusion (“we two are one”) and so on. The ordinary
madness that is falling in love (“I`m crazy about you”) – and falling out of love – is an area
in which the usually hidden substrates of unconscious phantasy come alarmingly close to the
surface of awareness, with a vigour and even violence that can be unsettling. I would like to
concentrate on the “feeling-thoughts” that accompany the loss of love as these seem to me to
permeate these discomfiting and powerful paintings.

Unconscious phantasies have an innate form involving a subject, a me; an object which has
supposed intentions; and a relationship in which the subject wishes to do things to the object
on the basis of the object`s intentions. There are certain intrinsic discriminations: the object
is felt to be located inside or outside the subject: and the object`s intentions are felt to be
either benevolent or malevolent towards the subject. The process of falling in love tends to
animate “object relations” in an especially saturated way, which provokes ecstatic, delicious
delight as well as enormous anxiety. It is no accident that we talk of being madly in love,
and Rilke`s observation that love is very close to terror is no less true for being a truism.
The sequelae of losing love are describable in terms which testify to the way in which a
constellation or agglomeration of parts of ourselves and of the other has been dismantled so
that we can feel fractured – we talk of “breaking up”, “splitting up”, a broken heart, falling
apart, being in pieces, distraught (literally dragged or pulled into bits). When becoming
involved, it seems that we invest (the word also means “besiege”) parts or aspects of
ourselves and in phantasy establish these “self-bits” in the other. When love is lost it is a
process precisely analogous to that described so lucidly and insightfully by Freud in his
paper “Mourning and Melancholia”. He describes the parallels between the process of
grieving a death and the tormenting awareness of loss in the condition of melancholia – what
would now be termed depression – in which a part of the self, an introjected object, is felt to
have died inside the self. “The shadow of the object”, he says, has fallen across the ego. We
are haunted by what we have lost.

A lost object is felt to be absent in two ways, simultaneously . Firstly as a loss absolute, a
vacuum, a nullity. Secondly as the “presence of an absence”, like a hole that is in the shape of
the lost object, a constant and specific reminder of who or what precisely has been lost. It is
this latter against which the bereft can rage and complain, so that grief becomes grievance:
“I hate you because you are not here”. As though one has had stolen the parts of oneself that
have been installed lovingly in the other, and they have also wrenched away the parts of
themselves that one has taken into oneself. Sometimes elements of the lost other are felt to
remain, but they have turned bad. It can, as most of us know from the vicissitudes of our
own lives, be a (hopefully temporarily) annihilating experience. Indeed, it can threaten to
become an endless, timeless misery – “no worst there is none”, writes G.M. Hopkins; “stop
the clocks” says Auden.

This triptych of paintings seems to me to crystallise the frame of mind, or rather the
unframing of a mind, which has suffered some kind of awful loss. They are at the same time
disturbing to look at and compelling of the attention. The woman is nude, obviously – but
more than that she seems naked, exposed, stripped bare, denuded. She stoops somewhat,
slightly hunched, her arms hanging by her sides: she seems almost broken. Through the
sequence of paintings she seems progressively to disintegrate, the image suffers a breakdown
of coherence. She might say “Something or someone was the whole world to me and now all
meaning and sense of identity is crumbling away”. Her eyes in particular force the viewer
into a relationship with this woman, and provoke a kind of bifurcated, ambivalent response.
There is a blank anxiety in her gaze that elicits complicit sympathy: “I know something of
how you feel and I am moved by your plight.” I have some fellow feeling for this human
being who appears so soaked in inconsolable sorrow. But there is also an agitated response
wherein I feel confronted by her accusatory, reproachful stare, intruded into so that I feel
defensive: “whatever has happened here, I am not responsible”. And even a twinge of guilt –
“have I done something to make her, or anyone else, feel so wretched?” It is almost as
though she might threaten to recover by force what has been stolen from her,
indiscriminately, as if the whole world were indicted. The tension between pity and a
sensation akin to persecution leaves the viewer with a nervous sense of
engagement/estrangement. Perhaps there is also a hint, as she becomes increasingly
discomposed, that prefigures the ultimate entropic decomposition that awaits us all by virtue
of having been alive and therefore of having been able to love. The seductions of Thanatos
over Eros are well documented. Hamlet laments “oh that this too too solid flesh would melt,
thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.” These paintings challenge the glib assumption that “it is
better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”, and at least make us wonder.

New works 2003: Diving for pearls."

We understood
Her by sight; her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought.
John Donne. Funeral Elegies

After the holocaust.
The recent works of Gry Hege Rinaldo consist of a combination of figure studies, a series of portrait drawings and a decisive naked self-portrait triptych. The logical nature of this combination may not be apparent on first viewing, yet by looking at each group in turn a total significance can be suggested. One might say that after the holocaust , rage and sorrow have crystallised themselves into various expressions of existential endurance.

Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life’s nothingness. André Maurois

Until 2003 Rinaldo’s pictures portrayed one individual, they were depictions of a person completely alone, often in a state of mental and physical stasis. Quite suddenly this has changed, now the works show either one figure in an alert position, or, two figures in a highly choreographed pose. Cindy Shearman’s photography is a fine example of an artist who manipulates viewing angles in order to choreograph and dictate the viewer’s sense of power, vulnerability or even guilt. Similarly in Rinaldo’s earlier works the viewing angle was crucial to our experience of the art. The viewer was privileged; often one was placed above the figure, peering down on a reclining or embryonic pose. Yet in recent works the angle of exchange and communication between the viewer and those viewed is more equal. We stare at these paintings face to face. Interpersonal drama is now included, often emphasised by negative/positive colour contrast. For example on page 9 , use of a cold blue contrast negates and denies all form of empathic communion between the two reclining figures. There is a helpless distance within a sexless coupledom. Yet, as with the earlier pictures, the observer is still favoured. The communication between the two painted individuals is choreographed such that we are privileged to a frozen moment: these tableau vivant present epiphanies of a couple’s relationship.

A painterly aspect has surfaced in these recent works. Areas of the canvas show the artist enjoying the fine border between abstract and figuration. As a painter it has become one of her preoccupations to see how far it is possible to twist real appearances out of shape without depriving them of conviction. By this act of taking reality to the border of a painterly “unreality”, Rinaldo heightens our awareness of both. Drawing continues to infuse the paintings. Yet each discipline is most successful when it is practised for itself; drawing and painting must be balanced in Gry Hege Rinaldo’s total output.

Portrait drawings: The Cul-de-sac series
We live in an age where men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
Oscar Wilde Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Simultaneous to the positive/negative pictures of doomed couples, Rinaldo has worked on a series of traditional portraits depicting a variety of facial expressions. Derived from photographs, one model’s face forms a series of expressions depicting a spectrum of psychological states. A classical portrait style is used with almost scientific scrutiny.
In the mid eighteenth century classical portraiture was heavily influenced by an increased interest in scientific research, which for sculpture included not only anatomy but what is now termed psychology as well. Franx Xavier Messerschmidt produced a series of more than 60 classical portrait busts, primarily grimacing and representative of the “human passions”. Messerschmidt’s obsession was to eventually deprive him of his reason. Today, there is something fascinating and disturbing about these systematic variations on a cracked theme. His sculptures are portraits deprived of an individual personality; they are scientific types.
Similarly, one is not pulled into the personality of Rinaldo’s model; indeed the character of this face remains frustratingly undefined. Rinaldo explains that she tries to gain an empathic distance from her model and appreciates a model who can portray a wide variety of facial expressions. The portrait drawings depict a series of psychological norms, completely devoid of the intense doomed communication of, for example, the painted couple. Indeed the drawings are an antidote and a balance to the suffering inherent in Rinaldo’s paintings. These portrait drawings are unnerving since they are saturated in Oscar Wilde’s “abstract sense of beauty”. As with Messerschmidt’s clinical studies, these imitations of psychological depth display little sign of profundity, the model does not have tragic “physical and intellectual distinction”:

There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands… (However,) we shall suffer from what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
Oscar Wilde Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Fragmentation of self - Ecce Homo
Displaying the naked body in a self-conscious manner, rather than by accident, is an overtly significant act: significance being inherent in the human body. The body unadorned is therefore a prime vehicle for the artist to express philosophical attitudes . In naked portraits the meeting of two genres “portraiture” and “the nude” widens the terms of reference. The nude is indelibly a term of art and art criticism, by casting herself as a ‘nude’ Rinaldo calls upon iconographical sources drawn from a variety of historical attitudes toward the naked body. These swing in a polar fashion between the classical celebration of the unadorned athlete as an ideal of physical beauty, to the Christian correlation between the naked body and an awakening of shame and guilt.
Historically, three types of naked self -portrait can be seen: a nuditas naturalis depicts a pre-fall image of self with reference to the Garden of Eden; as nuditas criminalis the artist portrays the experience of sex, normally alongside a partner; the third category shows the artist as an earnest human being, the self portrait’s equivalent to Christ as Ecce Homo. In Fragmentation 1-3 Rinaldo uses this third category. Rather than the portrait drawing’s pure document of physical appearance, with unflinching and earnest stare the artist now stands naked as a self-elected example of humanity. This tactic acts in two ways, the artist reveals herself without pretension, and, the artist’s stare causes the viewer to question him/herself in the face of such an honest display. Durer and Egon Shiele are the most famous historical practitioners of this genre. Notably, but perhaps not surprisingly, female examples are harder to find. Similar to the Durer self-portrait, Rinaldo stands and stares accusingly at her observer in the manner of a flagellation of Christ or a wronged Cyclops. In addition the triptych repetition enables Rinaldo to manipulate the image in a series of distortions whereby the face and body disintegrate. The artist reveals a painterly bravado not previously exhibited. There is a freedom of brushstroke, and most tellingly, an enjoyment of the flatness of the paint surface previously unseen by this most realist of figurative painters. Whilst still firmly rooted in her drawing skills , Rinaldo now manipulates her digital photographs on a computer in order to create the required source material. Similar to Francis Bacon’s archetypal images of the mid twentieth century, Rinaldo distorts a thing beyond its appearance, but by using the triptych structure, the distortion is constantly returned back to a recording of the appearance. For Rinaldo the deed of painting is like bringing someone back (in this case herself), such that the process of painting echoes the process of recalling from the imagination. It is therefore significant that the ‘perfect’ image of an unfragmented standing artist is not painted.

Today, as ever, good painting is still about the creation of a tension and a reconciliation between intimating nature’s volume and preserving the flatness of the picture plane, in the same way as verse is essentially about the opposition between the natural flow of language and the constraints of rhyme and metre. In most painting that opposition is clothed in other concerns, but there are times when it is laid bare. Rinaldo’s fragmented and disintegrating body is one such example.

When a much loved son, very handsome in face and figure, was killed at Corona, Signorelli had him stripped naked and, with extraordinary strength of mind and without shedding a tear, made a representation of the body, because he wished always to be able to see, in the works of his own hands, what nature had given to him and what cruel Fortune had taken away. Vasari

Rather than Signorelli’s direct loss of a son, the loss involved in Rinaldo’s triptych involves the artist losing herself. From a state of mental and physical stillness (in the holocaust paintings), recently this artist has “evolved” her art to depict an existential awareness of self-fragmentation. Cruel Fortune has not taken away the original complete version since none of these three images were ever whole.

Pearl diving
One can liken artists to pearl divers, those who wrest what they can from the deep past, not to resuscitate the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages, but because the rich and strange things they find in the deep “suffer a sea-change” and survive in a new form and shape. The human image thus lies in waiting only for the pearl diver who one day will come to it and bring it up into the world of the living. Occasionally a pearl is brought to the surface; there looms up before us an image whose presence is as disturbing, as unexpected, as fleeting, as commanding, as the presence of people who in life confront and torment us with their ambiguity.

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.
Thomas Wolfe

The present work of Rinaldo forms a complete production whereby the artist balances some fascinating antithetical pairs; rational scrutiny & emotive intensity; cold beauty & savagery. The overall result of these combinations can be termed tragic. Not tragic in the classical sense of Greek mythology, when kings and heroes were displayed in a crisis of confrontation with their gods. Indeed it is now understood that the increasing disunity of society, its loss of common spiritual values, has been detrimental to tragedy, which relies on the representative nature of individual disaster. Rather Rinaldo’s is a more fundamental existential tragedy, independent of social codas. Some forty years ago, Francis Bacon was asked if he intended to create tragic art and he replied:

No. Of course, I think that, if one could find a valid myth today where there was the distance between grandeur and its fall of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, it would be tremendously helpful. But when you are outside a tradition, as every artist is today, one can only want to record one’s own feelings about certain situations as closely to one’s own nervous system as one possibly can .

Yet I still contest that Rinaldo can be called a tragic painter because her human images are not merely the victims of their anguished situation. They have an air of defiance in the face of destiny that is not only the product of the timeless settings in which the figures are placed, but due to the existential grandeur with which they are presented. The grandeur and simplicity of, for example, a pearl.