Ida Ekblad’s paintings are like birthday cakes heading for your face. Their thickly layered foundations can take years to build because of the time it takes for the oils to dry, Peder Lund informs us in the press release for the artist’s second solo presentation at the gallery, ACTIVATED SLUDGE. Her slow procedure is a stark contrast to the visual immediacy of her canvases. Despite the paint’s sculptural depth, everything that goes on in the picture takes place on the same level; it rushes towards you. In addition to six new paintings and two rather nondescript glass works, the exhibition includes a bronze sculpture, AMPHIDROMIC ECHOES (all works 2024), doused with so much paint that it, strictly speaking, counts as a painting – an incarnation of the impasto stroke’s yearning for a life in three dimensions.
Ekblad’s motifs have few distinct figures besides flowers, which are often placed near the centre of the composition, so let’s call them floral. Here and there a stylised star shape will crop up. Unevenly demarcated fields of clear and contrasting colours butt against each other. Sudden breaks between textures and colour schemes create a kaleidoscopic effect reminiscent of collage. To the extent that Ekblad’s images are spatial, this space is not perspectival but constructed through overlapping layers. The similarity between Ekblad’s canvases and screen environments has been pointed out by others. In her last exhibition with the gallery, several of her paintings resembled cropped image searches. No such explicit connection to digital media is made in ACTIVATED SLUDGE, even if Ekblad’s pictorial space remains fragmented and compressed. The hyper-saturated canvases have an almost caricatured vitality telling us that they won’t accept a life as footnotes to a dominant visual culture unfolding on other surfaces.
In an interview with The Guardian a few years back, American artist Seth Price offered an evolutionist take on painting that I thought was good: “Painting is like a cockroach or a shark, perfectly evolved.” Price’s quip teases out the medium’s striking resilience, a framing that seems to sit well with Ekblad’s vitalist program. Painting’s fitness advantage over other art forms is generally assumed to have to do with communication and logistics: we immediately recognise paintings as objects, even if their content or meaning eludes us, and they are easy to ship, store, and hang. These factors obviously contribute to the medium’s success. But I think the importance of the painted surface’s exceptional receptivity is often missed. The short distance from manipulation to result, and how every little creative decision or involuntary twitch is traced and put on display, gives the medium a heightened liveliness that boosts its appeal. Ekblad’s richly textured surfaces exploit this impressionability to the fullest, becoming almost like casts of the acts that created them.
Not surprisingly, Ekblad conceives of painting in rather bodily terms. In a statement issued with the press release, she emphasises the fluid qualities of paint as well as her hands-on involvement with the materials. The titles all mention liquids or liquid states: slime, goo, mud, ooze, and so on. It would be going too far to say that Ekblad subscribes to an ensouled concept of painting, but she isn’t shy about foregrounding the symbiotic compact between the respective bodies of artist and medium. In her invocation of flows and activation, we can even glean a desire for the dissolution of painter and painting as separate categories. Her term activation certainly carries with it a whiff of animism, allowing her touch to give life to inert matter, even if just in the sense of a transfer of energy.
Ekblad’s glass figures are less convincing manifestations of this vision. They comprise several handcrafted versions of two different floral motifs mounted in circles on the wall. On first – and also second and third – glance, they look like diluted spinoffs from her paintings, lacking the the artist’s signature presence and visual heft. Ekblad supplementing her paintings with experiments in a hitherto unexplored medium brings to mind painter Øyvind Sørfjordmo’s recent exhibition at Galleri Brandstrup just down the street, where he premiered some attempts at jacquard weaving. As with Ekblad’s glass works, these were promoted as an exciting expansion of his repertoire. Are the gallerists doing this to assure collectors that the artist is in a growth mode, vigorously expanding into new territory? Or are the artists strategically courting traditional handicrafts to dilute painting’s implicit claim to sovereignty and make it more at home in a visual culture that no longer condones value distinctions between different media and practices? Whatever the case, Ekblad’s glass works emit a boutiquey scent that isn’t doing the exhibition as a whole any favours.
Of course, this atmosphere might be exactly what she is after. Ekblad dispels the hierarchical distinction between glass and painting by homing in on their shared physical properties: they flow, then stiffen. Dallying with handicraft is typical behaviour for art that strives to bridge the gap between viewer and work in order to become more relatable. What is given up in return for this increased intimacy is the dialectical quality that sets art apart from other creative endeavours, an internal contradiction that disrupts communication and makes us unsure. We don’t quite get art because it is not made for us in the same way that a cute glass flower is. Art contains an inhuman element; it is meant to disappoint and frustrate in order to reprogram us, that is to modify our attitudes and actions.
Admittedly, this is an airy and coarse definition, but now that it has become forbidden to look down on handicrafts, it seems a good time to try to grasp this difference that sets art apart, even if only to have a name for what is being scrapped. The sensual process Ekblad’s paintings originate from also becomes a script for how we relate to them as viewers, suggesting the medium is an intimate physical event also at the receiving end. This premise in no way precludes estrangement, as Ekblad’s canvases aptly demonstrate, but it requires that the frosting retains some abrasive potential.