Hakan Rehnberg

How to conceive painting  beyond figures and colors? In this  exclusive conversation with Swedish artist, Håkan Rehnberg (1953) structure, composition and form fade away to create a more radical & existential experience  of aesthetics, sharing with us his idea on how art can challenge the gaze of the beholders, as well as the importance of his artistic process. Underneath the brushstroke stands a decision. The gesture that marks there is no turning back.His starts in the world painting in the 70s were driven for his interest in an expressionist and organic composition. His work today is an example of the possibilities of contemporary painting.

Regina De Con Cossio: In some interviews you have mentioned that your paintings are the product of a single work session. In that sense some critics relate your artistic practice with concepts such as materiality and transparency, opacity and legibility. However, I think we should also talk about time. How do you define time as part of your artistic interests?

Håkan Rehnberg: I am obsessed with the process that when you start to make a painting you can in some way never leave it. You are stuck to it: like faith or an event that has happened that you can’t undo. So, each painting is like an oracular message. In Greek tragedy, the person never understands the oracular message until it occurs as death. That is also an act of love because if you are obsessed with an artwork and like it and love it, then it is a lifetime issue. 

I don´t leave it. Kafka in his latest moments and Mircea Cărtărescu have talked about that. They want to write pieces without interruption, made in one single moment.

RDCC: Few people know that poetry is close to your heart and the impact of the Greeks in your work. How did that start?

HR: I think it started while reading poetry. I read quite a lot of Paul Celan.It was in the late 80’s when a friend of mine who was living in Berlin and I decided to translate Celan into Swedish. Now, he has published all of Paul Celan’s late authorship, and we have ever since cooperated quite a lot. The reading of Paul Celan’s poetry has meant quite a lot for me. We still have a small group of poets and gather sometimes to talk about it. 

Hölderlin and the reading of the Greeks have also interested me. Together with other colleagues, we made the translation of Heraclitus into Swedish.  I like that, because very  few people in the art world know that I have done that, since I have tried to keep those intellectual interests separated from my artistic work. When you look at my artworks you do not need to be loaded with a lot of philosophy or poetry, it is enough to look at them. My works are very physical as they come from the hands literally. Before I work, in some way I invoke my house gods, but I think they are freestanding. I am very sceptical about hermeneutical methods to understand a work of art.

RDCC: In a conversation you had with Daniel Bairnbaum you mentioned that the works where you fuse objects with paintings were inspired by works by Brice Marden, Robert Ryman and Donald Judd. In that conversation you say that, although that impulse came from America, your works had a totally Central European eye. How can you describe that eye?

HR: And Barnet Newman! ….  I have been influenced by them, but I always want to do something different from what they have done. I think that American artists are professionals. In some way, the handicraft for what they are doing is very important. But in European art the handicraft is not so strong, they rest on a more complicated cultural, religious, and philosophical and existential tradition of belonging and not belonging.

I am more in the existential side than in the professional one. I worked and I was quite close friends with an American artist, a minimalist sculptor,  whose name is Richard  Nonas. He just passed away, and he was quite American in his way of wanting to dominate. I am quite distant from that attitude; I don’t even see my technique as being professional in the way that I can dominate. John Cage for instance talks about deskilling, like “not to being able to making” but “not being able to make”. Those kinds of paradoxes are quite relevant to me.

RDCC: In the same conversation you say that, “the work of art stands for an action of resistance, no understanding, no usefulness, but a sense of wonder and a vertiginous questioning”. And that “art is not something you learn, own, or even practice, but the compulsion in every situation to seek the point where you fall off the stage”. How do these sensations translate into your artistic processes? What are the actions of your daily life that you can identify in your artwork?

HR: Fall of the Stage, yes! There was an exhibition that was called the “Double Scene” (presented by Moderna Musset in 2015) . The title  was a little bit of a reference to Hamlet, where inside the tragedy you act a comedy. In my studio, I have a small little shelf, around 40cm high. I used to say that when I paint I have my foot on that shelf and that is like a parallel world, the art world. It’s like a theatrical scene.  I have the other foot in reality.

That is also related to my idea of sculpture as frontal sculpture. Leaning backwards and taking a small step forward. That deviation from the flatness is also how my paintings are made: they are breaking the rules of flatness and have that original sculptural approach. 

That is the physicality of the paintings.The materiality is not the same as in a hammer or a tool, it is more like a philosophical materiality. If you are familiar with the platonic concept of “chóra” that is close to my understanding of it. I have written a text about that once upon a time. I related it to a painting and the ambivalence of that materia. While a painting is an object that comes towards you, it also creates something that you can´t really grip. 

That has been quite essential for me all the time.  

This is related also to what we spoke before about time. In Plato’s Parmenides, he speaks about the instant, as something that can’t be put into concepts. It defies language. You must approach it from different angles. When you approach a certain language you fall off the stage.

RDCC:  Do you think there are artistic visions that come from territories or historical moments? What motivates these visions?

HR: I have tried to be distant towards the attitude of using a language for aesthetics. For instance, I listen to quite a lot of music and one of the musicians that I like is Helmut Lachenmann; one of the most important contemporary composers, who was a pupil of Luigi Nono. He never wanted to use his formal language. He had to approach it in a new way constantly to start from a new beginning all the time. 

When you become the representative of that historical moment, you transform into a symbol instead of an active member so you’re prescribing what that belonging means.

RDCC: In contemporary art there are artists who shy away from interviews and, on many occasions, do not wish to explain their works or “intellectualize” the processes of art. Others, on the contrary, have an articulated discourse: they not only describe their artistic processes, but can also connect art with other spheres. From my point of view, what the latter do is to connect art with oral language. It is not that they embellish paintings or any work of art with words but that they connect orality or writing with the visual. Does orality have any importance in your art in this sense?

HR:  I like this question and underwritten the word orality because it has been a life problem to me. I used to stutter quite a lot when I was young and I had real problems to  speak, that is why not doing it is quite important to me. I rarely talk about how it is to approach to a person and not being able to say what I want to say, what I do is that I approach and I am not able to say anything, I do approach the other person and that connection of  that meeting is important.  I don’t have a message to say, it is just an idea of sharing something with another person, a state of openness. The act of painting is connected to that type openness because I try to avoid all rules, although there are some I don’t understand. When I paint I am looking at what I am doing and it has to approach something that’s not familiar to me, it’s something strange and it’s like letting something strange approach you.