Opening
Saturday 7th September, 6-8pm

Exhibition
11.09. - 05.10.24
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Once hooked, you might find yourself eagerly awaiting a new painting by Endre Aalrust. His works’ winking motifs, sensuality and modesty make them appealing in a way that feels almost illicit. Take, for example, Daddy Issues (2024), a dappled and tender family jogging scene that is both ordinary and eye-catching; have fathers really finally grown? Part of the pull of Aalrust works is his anachronistic choice of means for depicting contemporary life. In his hands, old-fashioned realist, salon-scaled canvas painting comes off as a subversive pursuit. Regardless of their topic, quirks or kinks, a disarming, open-minded generosity enlivens his works. There is something particular about the artist’s mixture of uncommon friendliness and serious undertones. Formally, you can see it already in the thoughtfulness of his compositions with their well-balanced lines and volumes. A visual architecture that all happens on the canvas, and in which—unusually—photography only plays a minor role. It has taken decades for Aalrust to hone his technique. For a long period some years ago he painted in private, limiting himself to a single-sized board (ca. 45 x 40 cm) a discipline which sharped his compositional skills. This gestation period, however, was not just about gaining dexterity, it also involved a personal and political questioning about his future place (if any) in art and the medium of painting. (For a while, for example, video and film seemed more ethical, more issue-based to pursue). In the end, some of the best painters are those that come to it with nagging doubts and unanswerable questions, but then paint themselves out of a corner to discover a renewed sense of autonomy. Aalrust is one of them. These days, he calibrates his colors and tonal shifts with relish and without apology, and deploys an engagingly brushy technique that doesn’t tip into hubris or irony.

Plenty happens in painting before paying the subject depicted any notice. And only dilettantes judge a painting by whether they like what is depicted: landscape, flowers, cats—peachy, the poor, the queer—oh dear! On that score: Aalrust likes vulnerable men (a mix of staunch friends, as well as attractive strangers—real and fictional), dogs, casual clothes, ‘topknot’ hairdos (kind-of), but not necessarily in that order. But also, how light hits the glaze of a vase, or a dappled pathway running through shrubbery or trees. Then there are hot red glowing backlit ears and moments of unobserved relaxation, of letting down the guard, both together and alone. He also revels in silly shapes and visual puns. Here and there, ‘something sticks out like dog’s balls’ in an otherwise peaceful scene. The artist told me that most of his paintings’ subjects are ‘ridiculously banal’ if described. This is not always true. Take, for instance, images of a vase with a flower but cropped so one can not see the bloom, a fleshy bare backside sitting on a paintings’ compositional edge, a man in despair behind a tree in Lederhosen—too drunk or out of luck or both? Taken as a whole, Aalrust’s work often mines the profundity of light-heartedness. For years he has an almost daily telephone conversation with a writer friend who likes to suggest odd things for him to paint. Time to chat, laugh, gossip and talk art—are high on the list of life’s abundant pleasures. Camp is not academic, it is a matter of everyday survival of the spirit. A well-placed giggle can be an assault on the patriarchy.

Aalrust’s work also looks intensely to painting’s past to garner and reimagine in the light of today. Mr. X (2024), for example, is a lush portrait of the artist’s partner and shows him in a fabric wrap improvised red gown that emulates John Singer Sargent’s infamous portrait Madame X (1883/1884). There is, of course, a long queer strain, sometimes maligned as decadent or privileged, of languid figurative realism. It stands in contrast to the soldiers and workers that proliferated across political canvases in the 20th century, which, as painter Lukas Duwenhögger once observed to me, rendered working-class men ideological beasts of burden. Then, by way of conceptual juxtaposition, think about the Bloomsbury group’s painterly selfies—oversensitive, haughty, ambivalent. Or later, to upwardly mobile David Hockney in late 1960s, having escaped the incessant rain of his home county, poolside in the suburbs of Los Angeles, paints and pencils close by. In short, errant or smuggled displays of homosocial leisure and ease, have serious sex political implications. For me, Aalrust gives this queer lineage an update by removing the need for class privilege to hothouse us. Norm-core to the core, his figures might be encountered anywhere on public transport or the streets, or in the parks or apartments of Berlin, Amsterdam, or Oslo. Meanwhile, Aalrust’s oeuvre and world view hinges on the possibility and agency of softness, the fey, the un-forceful, the casual encounter. The sideways glance held too long in paint. This, for instance, allows him access to the tender heart of a Norwegian heavy metal fan, or to convey the sacred interspecies bond we feel for pets.

- Dominic Eichler