Simon Watney
The work of Gerlinde Behr-Johansen is illuminated by the great if distantly reflected conflagrations of the second world war and the toxic dawning of the nuclear age. Her themes are elemental, and inspired by her related interests in questions concerning the origins of the universe and the ecological threats we face today. Resolutely non-illustrative, her work finds metaphoric forms appropriate to these concerns. Hers is a formless world of asphyxiation, dehydration, fumes, and vapours. For example, it is unsettlingly unclear if we are above or below the angrily billowing red clouds to which she is sometimes drawn, or what type or scale of catastrophe informs their menacing radiation. She is also attracted to the metallic imagery of wire and rust and industrial dereliction. Moreover fractures and bruising are rarely far from the surface. Building on the tragic sublimity of the Romantic movement, she has long found inspiration in the 'imaginary landscapes' of Adolph Gottlieb, together with the recognition that destruction and disaster are also preconditions for rebirth and evolutionary growth, as much in the life of the individual as of the planet. Transcendental and non-didactic, her art also doubtless relates in unquantifiable ways to half a lifetime spent in the Far East. In recent years glass has provided her with a medium highly appropriate to her particular artistic and personal vision, fusing associations of molten rocks and alchemical furnaces with those of transparency and fragility. Open to the accidental, these three-dimensional works eloquently condense her chosen apocalyptic themes of strength and vulnerability, and the tragically inevitable links between pain and loss and the possibility of redress and reparation.
Simon Watney
Art Historian, Critic and Author
Katherine Despax
Les peintures de Gerlinde Behr-Johansen présentent un grand intérêt car elles sont en même temps non-figuratives et reliées à une source précise d'information, un événement ou un objet. Parfois de manière impressionnante: "Le 11 septembre" (où il faut quelque teps avant d'apercevoir la trace des tours fantômatiques à travers la brume bleu-glacier et la profondeur aérienne ressemblant à première vue à un espace vide), ou "Le jour où ma vie n'a plus jamais été la même", ou "Ayres Rock" (dont l'intensité émerge de la partie invisible du rocher) etc. En sorte que l'interprétation (au sens musical du terme) a été saisie comme faisant partie intégrante de la création, et a fait trace et inscription sur la toile qui a perdu, de ce fait, son caractère de surface plane et, par un effet de texture, est devenue tri- (ou plutôt quadri-, en tenant compte de la temporalité) dimensionnelle. Sur certaines oeuvres les différences de texture comprenant des surfaces apparentées à de la soie ou du cuir façonné, dans une manière très japonaise et orientale. (J'ai toujours aimé la la subtilité d'un travail de texture accompagnant le travail sur la couleur, les effets brillants ou mats etc). En d'autres termes, cette oeuvre est très originale et totalement postmoderne et vaut vraiment d'être vue.
She is a very interesting artist. Her paintings are very interesting to me because they are at the same time non-figurative and yet connected with some precise source of inspiration, event, or even object. Very powerfully indeed: Sept 11th (where it takes time to realise that there are traces of have-been towers through the white-blue hase and aery depth of what looks at first sight like an empty space), or The day my life was no longer the same, or Ayres Rock (the intensity emerging from the invisible part of the rock) etc. So that interpretation (in a musical sense) has been captured as part of the creation that has left its track or inscription on canvas. Also the work on texturing and on colour is something (as with music) I like very much, as a challenge to the canvas losing its plane dimension and becoming simply thanks to the texturing three (or four, indeed, time being part of it) dimensional. And on some pieces the differences in texturing include surfaces that are like silk material, or embossed leather and are very Japanese or oriental. (I have ever been keen on subtle texturing, or work on colour, or on different whites or on glossy and matte effects etc).
In other words, it is very original, modern or postmodern, and worth an exhibition.
Katherine Despax,
ancienne élève ENS, Agrégée, psychanalyste