Endre Opheim - 
The Heart does not Beat in the Middle of the Body

“The Heart does not Beat in the Middle of the Body” is Endre Opheim’s first work for Jane, a project pavilion newly initiated by KOSA. The striking colour saturated installation proposes a futurist and materialist view of reality and in confluence with Jane, is triggered by abstract geometry in physical systems and spatial bodies, by the architectonic of nature. With the square for their common denominator, Opheim’s painted objects elaborate subtle deviations in systemic thought, where symmetry is the assumed fundament in the figuration of bodies. Multiple single point perspectives and their rhythm variations in “The Heart does not Beat in the Middle of the Body” unfold on a wall triptych and two freestanding objects, all seen through a picture plane of reflective, mirroring glass.

The objects’ painted imagery articulates “view” as such, at once window, room and flow through time encoded forms, variable scales, composition and colour. Stylistically, the paintings are strikingly hard yet deep. The use of pigment is essential in unfolding the expansive colour nuances of the earth: cobalt blue, cadmium red, verona green earth, ochre yellow, burnt umber, green umber, ivory black and titanium white. Opheim sands the paint between layers, creating a tactile image surface with a material depth of fresco. While the colours and abstract shapes of the work have a psychic effect – producing what Hilma af Klint would have defined as a spiritual meditation on the transcendent reality beyond the physical world – the metaphysical element of “The Heart does not Beat in the Middle of the Body” links earth’s colours to human energy as much as to material energies, affecting the internal and the external worlds of Jane. The painterly work diagrams an immaterial world, creating tensions/relations between the inner and the outer, between static and moving, matter and mind. 

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