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Morten Slettemeås 

JANE’s TRILOGY ( I and II )
Curated by K.O.S A


Jane 2023/1, June – October

Fourteen stretched painting canvases, sized to fit between her structural frames, make the skin of the Jane pavilion. Together with its frames they form a precise, taught surface of a simple prism. The canvases were installed three years ago and left to absorb the materiality of the forest and collect time. When they began to give way under its wear, we invited Morten Slettemeås to paint them, and in that way cause a turn in nature's course.

In JANE’s TRILOGY part I, Slettemeås first removed the canvases from the pavilion and patched and repaired the parts that were torn. He then hung them on a nearby wall, gathered into a surface that measured 2.88 x 9.36 meters. He decided they would be painted as a single work, that it would be a landscape and that it would be figurative.

Over the course of three months, he has conducted painting as a performative project in the forest room next to Jane, open to public view. It is true that during that time his painting was literally straddled across a waterway, over a covered stream that runs directly underneath it. Also true that there has been a lot of water descending on it from the sky, down from the hills, between the trees everywhere, occasionally flooding the ground where the painter stood while working.

Slettemeås’ painting began as a lyrical, postcard view of a seaside divided into three segments: a red house with a figure on the left, the sea in the middle, a group of trees with three people on the right. In the course of its life, the starting image, like the canvases before it, has been subjected to internal and external dramas and transformed into a record of painterly history, thought and experience.

For the second part of the trilogy the panels are returned to the pavilion to acquire a three dimensional role as part of the exhibition APOTEK. One enters a reading room within the painting. During the month of September, Slettemeås’ painting is sculpture.

K.O.S A   
Krutthuset Oslo SA 
Gamle Maridalsvei 128
0890 Oslo
kosa@krutthuset.com

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