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Reminiscences

North-Information no. 241/1995

By Vibeke Isabel Benn Thomsen

Bodil Rosenberg's paintings are open stories. Abstract and excessive. Intimately perceived reminiscences and traces of a world which can be thought and therefore exists.
Lightly veiled surfaces in delicate nuances which interact with dusty areas and depths in dark violet.
Grey scratches in mustard yellow surfaces broken with a knife so stories are suggested on a deeper level. Figures appear and seconds later become windows in a sheat af rain - they close - others open up.

Under constant metamorphosis, like strange natural phenomena, they slowly unveil their flowing tales before ones eyes. Turn ones thoughts towards the infinite and back again.

And suddenly it's all gone.

Remaining is a multicoloured square on canvas - a sensation of substance, weight and presence. is the language the pictures use. Not only as an exterior style but also as an attitude towards life and matter. An existential demand to the painting. This concrete isolated piece of work, more profound than even the painters most imaginative ideas. Nothing trivial is seen, only constant artistic choices, where some things weigh more than others, although each is a necessary element in every picture.

This is the story, the intention, the language and the dialogue's possibilities if one gives oneself the time. But beyond this choice more is to be found. Something silent and indefinable created in the interplay between the artist and the picture. The works are always more than time, space and language knotted together and later untied. Honestly and without cynicism or irony, they sustain their presence, revealing no reason for their existrence beyond the artist's will.

They become as such examples of the desire for concentrated presence. The answer to a need, or grieving over daily superficiality, which often leads to irony.

Here, in the pictures, presence is an inevitability - reality is not lost. lt is rather scen and accepted as something that cannot be tied down and is impossible to put into distinct formulae. Lush and worth seeing, but both larger and more uncomprehensible than we expected. A reality with beauty in a con- centrated form, but including blind spots. Not a luxurious world, that seduces by hiding discontinuities and incongruous connections, but a place where impurity is accepted as part of the human condition. A place without demands for defined categories or unambiguous assertions - neither with regard to dust nor the stars.