(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Display: Guttorm Nordø: A tribute to the public library. Deichman Library 11. March 28. August 2016
Every time I see Guttorm Nordø's silly drawings, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. They take us to bed in recognition of something within ourselves that we didn't even know was there. Guttorm Nordø confronts us with our insanity, in a nutshell, in short; he has the rare ability to make us liberate normal. Nordø's art brings us to a realization: The path to normalcy goes through madness, that is, through Nordø's artistic interpretation of life.
How such a popular artist emerged in Norway at the end of the twentieth century should not be answered here. But for a lifetime, Guttorm Nordø has, with subtle, scrutinizing looks – with empathy and involvement – recorded and recorded the spectrum of human operations, as expressed before we have veiled and transformed them into ornate self-images. He shows us who we are before we are. And it is in this unadorned presentation of our encounter with the passions that the beauty of Nordø's art remains.
A man is eaten up by his own bone; a human dog on skates goes in all directions at once; a bullfighter is more afraid of himself than of the bull; does the man and woman dance, do they love, or do they fight? In one picture, a woman stands ready to chop down a veiled man's creature with an ax, in the next picture the man is confronted with his totally confused self.
Anger and rage, triumph and defeat, the deepest longings and misunderstood communication, and not least ubiquitous wonder and confusion meet us in these figures. In picture after picture, Nordø stages our experience of being in the world, as we had just arrived, which we are. Dreams, sexuality and violence, notions of eating and being eaten, chasing and being chased, are turned into a theater where Nordø, with its look for comedy, turns what lies at the bottom of our experiences into iconic art.
As with Chagall we see it all as it unfolds. The very event and effect of it is simultaneously depicted: In a double exposure, what happens to us is produced as we, surrendered to the world and its operations, becomes lived, shaken, hit, confused, knocked out. The biological-soul part of us has been given language.
Nordø leaves us with a tender, liberating comic free and able to study our dreams.
With Picasso's superb positioning of the figure in the image (only a dot and the energetic expression balanced) and a distinctive Nordic expressivity (the persona turned out), these highly subjective expressions become iconic images of the mind. Nothing can be added, nothing is deducted Form-conscious, present and intuitive, Nordø urges the rage of life.
Nordø prisoners, with the acute immediacy that the daisy line offers, great moments of imperfection; the degrading humiliation that our hunger causes here as we stumble in our own pursuits. But in the same vein as he exposes the most embarrassing of our existence, he sets us free with a tender, liberating comic and able to study our dreams, desires and defeats, laugh at them, reconcile us to them.
Like all artists of format, Nordø breaks with its contemporary adopted vision of art to establish its very own world, a world that, because it is carefully registered and signed, becomes universal, becomes our world.
Guttorm Nordø's silly drawings are, in the deepest sense, moral stories, in the sense that we are outside the law, before the law. Authoritarian structures and index fingers are completely absent. In a kind of wild modesty, this rebel insists that a free body presupposes a completely free mind.
Animals become humans, humans become animals, as in Goya and in Æsop's fables. And the mechanical, technical environment we surround ourselves with has grown with the body, as part of it – out of place, necessary, unwieldy. An over-sized body is obstructed by an over-sized head; a small, dysfunctional head is trapped in an overly large body. The mismatch between will and opportunity, power and intelligence is this philosophical fundamental problem of art.
In recent years, we have also become involved in some fresh "family portraits", a triangular drama involving man, lady and domestic cat, where the energetic masculine subject with great self-insight, wit and humor reveals and releases himself, the cat and the woman.
When the Northeast Pictures over and over again challenge us, it is because Nordø, without a weapon and with great sensitivity, transforms the drive, hunger and rage, helplessness and sexuality, into liberating art.
