E C C E H O M O
16 March – 15 April 2007
Private View: 15th March, 6-9pm
The Brick Lane Gallery brings together the recent work of two emerging Scandinavian artists in ECCE HOMO,
an exploration of contemporary issues of male identity and physicality, culture and nature. The Norwegian Bjorn Veno and the Finnish Antti Laitinen are two young male artists whose distinctive corpi deal with questions of authenticity and their striving to be real and whole men in a complex, changing world. Both artists make use of their own bodies, creating physical performances, which combine rigorous care in their planning and execution with a straight engagement with their subject matter, and with the land.
Bjorn Veno, Fight for the Huts
In his Sirkel series, Bjorn Veno steps into the space between childhood fantasy and adult suffering, revisiting the sites where he once enacted the male archetypes- a spaceman here, James Bond there-of his child self, now negotiating his response with the physical language of the body. Sometimes the artist appears heroic, stepping out boldly and dominating the foreground; at other times we see him creeping, furtive and apparently half starved, somewhere in the middle distance, looking about him in unfamiliarity- Robinson Crusoe washed up on the bleak and barren shores of the ghost of a Fjord from twenty years ago. A tangible sensation of loss permeates the series, and the photographs- whose composition and planning is as exquisite as it is rigorous- seem to sit half way between the still frame of an unidentified documentary film and the complex narratives of painting. Veno’s central metaphor for the position he finds himself in- somewhere between a refuge and an adventure- can be seen in this juxtaposition between the high finish of digital post-production and the raw physical gesture that cuts through it.
Self Portrait on the Swamp, Lambda print, 104 x 70cm
The work of Antti Laitinen is, in contrast to the studied sincerity and melancholic tension present in Veno’s photographs, at once more direct and more trivial. Laitinen has contributed the video work ‘The Snowman’ (2006) and two photographs: “Attempt to split the sea” and “Self portrait on the Swamp”, as well as “Sweat Work” and “Walk the Line”, to the show. Each of these works is more of a document than a piece in itself- an assemblage of fragments left over from the artists prolific, but always idiosyncratically absurd, explorations of his own identity as a male performance artist. In each of these pieces there is a dialogue between the artist’s identity and the wilderness- often we see Laitinen pushing the boundaries of his physical endurance and comfort in order to engage with the world. The results are often strikingly authentic for their documentary capacity- elusive portraits of the artists immobile, impossible to read features alongside the tell tale signs of a search for human intimacy against a distant nothingness, which hints at a rich seam of ideas and concepts to be discovered below these surfaces.
-Bjorn Veno (b. 1979) was awarded Gold at the London Photographic Awards and 1st place at the International Photographic Awards, both in 2006. He has previously taken part in several group exhibitions, including one at The Brick Lane Gallery last year.
-Antti Laitinen (b. 1975) has exhibited copiously in both solo and group exhibitions since his first Helsinki show in 1999. Both himself and his work are at the forefront of a new generation of Finnish performance artists engaged in a revaluation of the role of the author in relation to Scandinavian society and culture.
|
