SHADES - about Gøje Rostrup and her art

"I have to LOOK in different ways all the time, to go somewhere else. To acknowledge that images change all the time, according to who does the looking and WHERE they are looking from".

Reality and its mutability is Gøje Rostrup's artistic point of departure. Therefore, the spectator is invited to take his/her time to really experience what her images have to say. Costume design, scenography and the visual arts create the framework within which Rostrup's visual mastery of illusion and reality unfolds itself. The many years she has spent working in the world of theatre mean that she is familiar with spectacular dramatic devices. Nevertheless, the stories that she conjures up in her artistic universe are characterized by a quiet, understated humbleness that, like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, seems harmless, but conceals uncontrollable natural forces and dramatic narratives.

Gøje Rostrup's paintings are filled with photo-realistic portraits of apparently well-behaved children, but underneath the nice exterior, restlessness, uncertainty and insecurity lay waiting. Since 2004, Rostrup has developed a method that enables her to paint black and white photographic figures on canvas INCLUDING their thematic shades (canny and uncanny, for example). The Rostrup method can be seen as a refinement of the visual ambiguity of 'Rubin's Vase' (from a book by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin called Synsoplevede Figurer, 1915), an image that can either be seen as a vase or two faces, but not both at the same time.

At first, the only things that present themselves are cute portraits of well-behaved, well-dressed children, but Rostrup's method means that the primary image retreats into the background after a while, making way for the shades that dominate from there on. The illusory 'cuteness' and 'prettiness' of the portraits is slowly undermined by the figures' unconnectedness to the space that surrounds them. Imperceptibly, what is nice transforms itself into something that could just as well be naughty and what is pretty into something that can also be repulsive. This ambiguity is surprising, worrying but thrilling and fascinating at the same time.

Gøje Rostrup develops her theme in series that share certain formal characteristics, but there is a continuity from series to series as well. Series such as Se min kjole ("See my dress"), Behind the curtain and Anna M. er ude af form ("Anna M. is out of shape"), for example, give the centre of the stage over to the same isolated black-and-white figures. And in all three series, the relation between figure and space is addressed, be it in different ways. In Se min kjole, the space is blurred, possibly hidden, in any case unclear. Unclear and indefinable spaces can also be experienced as uncertain and therewith unsafe, because they mean a double loss of orientation; for the figure in the pictorial space, but for the spectator as well. That all the figures are children (interspersed with the occasional mother-and-child group), underlines the contrast between figure and space: if there is something one does not want to connect children and childhood with, it is lack of safety. Coloristically, one is given the impression that something is withheld, because the colours are locked up behind, or hidden away underneath, the grey surface. At the same time, the spatial lack of clarity underlines the figures' function as carriers of the narrative, because the narrative potential of space is inaccessible. The collage-like way the figures are treated means that there is no natural connection with the space they occupy, making them seem out of place. Temporally, the figures are out of place as well. Their dress, hairstyle and the dominance of greys reveal that they belong to the age of black-and-white photography. Like fugitives from a lost era, the figures talk about something or someone that once was, but is no longer. They almost seem to be spirits, revenants or ghosts.

In the series Behind the curtain, the isolated children are portrayed against a coloured background. The title refers to the curtain in front of a stage, thereby indicating that it is in such a theatrical space that the children find themselves. Here, too, space is veiled, because the spectator cannot know what is hidden behind the curtain. At first sight, the connection between figure and space appears to be more logical. After all, cute children acting on stage can very literally be understood as a cultural and pop-cultural phenomenon that still continues its triumphal procession around the globe. It is an ambivalent genre that is both celebrated and despised, implicitly introducing a paradox into the motive that animates the series, the connection between figure and space. The field covered by this pop-cultural phenomenon reaches from family life with the annual Christmas photograph of the happy child that performs for his/her family, via the immaculately groomed child that makes it to the headlines by handing a bouquet of flowers to the head of state, the Queen or the dictator, to show business, where eyes fill with tears as small Michael Jackson dances and sings while his inner life is destroyed. It is thought-provoking that no matter which shape the performance of these sweet children takes, the stage is as a rule created by grown-ups. But 'curtain' can also be understood to mean a living room curtain, turning the scene into a domestic one (behind the curtains) on which family life is acted out in all its aspects.

In the series Anna M. er ude af form, the children are not only isolated, but distorted as well, making them look physically handicapped. In this series, Rostrup employs optical clashes and the phenomenon called 'anamorphosis' - distortion of an image in such a way, that it only appears right when viewed from a specific angle. Of course it is this aspect of the works that the title is a reference to and a pun on. The children are placed in front of patterned surfaces. The surfaces remind one of beautiful textiles such as Matisse used them in his paintings - and also of Rostrup's own professional background. There is a pleasantly dramatic contrast between the distorted black-and white figures and the large, colourful patterns in the background. One can interpret the patterned surfaces as a peek into the figures' almost psychedelic inner life; an inner life which in that case would exceed the figures, both on the picture plane and as regards colour. But one can also interpret the series as focusing solely on the surfaces and textiles of the external world. In that case, the contrasts become a struggle between figure and space - a 'struggle' that is won by the patterns. But in several of the paintings a link is created between the patterned background and the clothes the children are wearing as well; as if the children help to tell a story that the pattern is the main carrier of. Thus, harmony is created despite the contradictions.

Space and the spatial play an important role in the series Se min kjole, Behind the curtain and Anna M. er ude af form, but they also leave their mark on the rest of Rostrup's artistic and scenographic practice. In Velkommen hjem ("Welcome home"), a work she showed at an exhibition space called Spanien 19C in the Danish city of Aarhus, for example, Rostrup also hides space, but here she does it literally by covering a concrete, physical space, including a couple of chairs and a table, with off-white sheets of polyester satin. In this work, the veiling of space indicates that the world is not what it pretends to be. The fabric does not hide a narrative, but visualises once more Rostrup's thematic ambivalence that pairs untrustworthiness, unreliability and illusion with cleanness, order and palpable physicality.

In the three series discussed above, the figures and grounds that together create pictorial space unequivocally inhabit the canvas. In Velkommen hjem, however, the figure is missing. The spectator takes its place. The experience of space is no longer mediated by a painted figure, but is generated directly from the spectator's own body. Taking this experience as one's starting point and returning to the paintings, it becomes clear that it is not only figure and ground that are at play, but the spectator him- or herself just as well, and perhaps to an even higher degree. The oppositions that emerge and clash in the paintings, the illusions that are created, only come into being because the spectator, his/her perceptive processes and his/her reactions were implied in the works right from the start. These are both literally and figuratively paintings that change according to who it is that does the looking and where they are looking from: the spectator, the person who sees and chooses his/her position vis-à-vis that which is seen, is the invisible, but essential extra ingredient that lends these works their effect.

Naja Pedersen, Artmediator and Writer, July 2009