黑料不打烊

In densely layered, colorful canvases, Cecilie Norgaard鈥檚 conceptual oil paintings jokingly tease out the hierarchical highs and lows produced by contemporary society. If oil painting was once a cornerstone in glorifying the upper class, Norgaard insists on flipping this narrative.

In her new painting series created for O鈥擮vergaden, she focuses on mundane, everyday objects. Motifs including cars, piggy banks, clocks, and trucks clash, crash, repeat, or multiply turning into their own abstraction in an absurdist theater of money, (visual) aesthetics, and acceleration.

Collectively creating a circular typography or alphabet, Norgaard鈥檚 motifs extend to include workers, city architecture, letters, colored pencils (looking a lot like the workers), and schematic indexes. Each individual piece is part of a wider ensemble of recirculated figures, forming a progression from one painting melting into another. Centrally placed in somber, stage-lit scenes, suspended from context, with a standard, old-fashioned, renaissance-like landscape in the background, the motifs jointly repeat as an inventory of working-class infrastructure turned primary aesthetic object. In one painting, haulage trucks and shipping containers鈥攌ey to European trade mobility鈥攁re rendered as monochrome rectangles, in turn transforming these aesthetically outcast shipping surfaces into something akin to early modernist block-colored abstractions.

These canvases are in critical dialogue with, if not directly revolting against, painting鈥檚 majestic history. Commenting on its own origin as painting, one piece shows a paint-by-numbers diagram overlaying a car-carrying trailer crashing across a highway sending multicolored cars flying, like flashes of color samples. Through repainting and repetition, the particular painterly figure can transform into a new symbolic signifier: when the colored cars crash, they become blurry, color-saturated abstractions, or, as seen in another painting, the clockface turns into a painter鈥檚 palette.

In spite of this playful prompt to create new meaning鈥攏ew semantics鈥攖here is something unsettling about Norgaard鈥檚 inescapable and circular universe. When the piggy bank is broken, it simply reveals another broken piggy bank, as if forming a continuously crashing, dark dream of everyday economics.