The Echo of Rooms
Peder K. Bugge (born 1971) received his art education at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts and divides his time today alternatively between Berlin and his home on Tjøme.
In his paintings Bugge is particularly occupied with exploring formal and colouristic elements. He plays on tensions between space and surface, figure and depth of field. This ambiguous approach connects his work to the nonfigurative tradition that flowered during the concretism of the 1950s, and Bugge's compositions wake associations with those of Swedish artist Olle Bærtling, the foremost exponent of concrete art in Scandinavia. Bærtling's paintings are characterized by a dynamic visual grammar, with diagonal wedges creating defined colour zones with a formal precision. There is also a connection between concretism and Gunnar S. Gundersen in Norway, who, in opposition to the prevailing trends in abstract natural lyricism, explored the painting as an autonomic constellation of independent pictorial elements.
Bugge's approach to formal elements is similar: on the one hand a painting suggests traces of rooms with vanishing points following the laws of perspective, and on the other it directs the observer towards the surfaces, which seem to challenge the visual space.
In earlier paintings Bugge favoured a composition with a vertical and horizontal construction. Diagonals play a more important role now, enhancing the sense of a dynamic spatial perspective that stretches out to embrace the observer. The works suggest a spatial echo into which the observer is invited, an architectonic landscape in which figurative and literary meaning is not predetermined. In this sense it is useful to interpret the paintings in relation to a central principle of minimalism: that the meaning of the work is not realized until seen by the eye of the observer. It is interesting to regard Bugge's works in this light, especially considering that they also might be seen as conforming to modernism's central principle of the autonomy of the art work, allowing for the intrinsic values of form, colour, and surfaces.
The atmosphere of the paintings might bring to mind a Platonic world that is realised in oils before the colours and shapes resolve into the objective status of recognizable things. In the same way we understand the world of the paintings as one where the laws of gravity don't apply. No attempt is made to explain the room as object, instead it borders on the impenetrable and metaphysical. Neither are the elements comprising the room affected by gravity, seeming rather to be shapes folded from paper, emphasizing the status of the painting as an expression confined to planes. Into these colourful landscapes are introduced black zones, dark enough to create a dizzying impression of black holes. The overlaid geometrical planes suggest portals and corridors that can be as equally inviting as unnerving.
Ralston Crawford was a central figure in the cubist realist movement known as precisionism that emerged in the United States in the 1920s and 30s. One can see clear parallels in Bugge's compositions to the geometrical partitioning and clear colouration of Crawford's precisionist paintings. The geometric forms with their seemingly metallic soundboard suggest a eulogy, in the spirit of progress, to the development of industry. With precisionism the seed was also sown for the growth of hard-edge painting, which is most often associated with the work of Lorser Feitelson. The name of the movement was however coined in 1959 by art critic Jules Langsner to describe a reaction, similar to that of concretists, to the subjective and emotional spontaneity cultivated by abstract expressionists. Common to both precisionism and concretism is the analytical approach, comparable in its objectivity to the scientific method. Similar tools dominate in Bugge's analytical working method, not least his clearly defined colour fields and a self-imposed restraint.
Bugge's paintings capture and hold the observer. They stimulate a sense of wonderment, not only at the sensual world of colour, but also at the extraordinary ability of this open and reflexive room, the painting, to renew itself.
Norwegian text: Tone L. Nyaas English translation: Andrew J. Boyle