The Brooklyn Rail

An old wooden cabinet is illuminated on the inside by a single bare bulb. The door tilts open. The light is warm. A dark cushion rests at the base. The texture of the object corresponds with its age and sets up a particular channel of domesticity to view the many small paintings that hang upon it, both inside and outside. It’s not comfortable, but it calls for the nearness of intimacy, and up close its strangeness is only amplified. The paintings depict heads, and the heads share the rippled and bumpy surface of the earth after an earthquake. They’re turbulent, but charming. The way Trude Viken paints a mouth brings joy.

The cabinet installation is called Old Audience Watching New Scenes (2023), and it anchors the Norwegian painter’s terrific exhibition. The activity of watching is perhaps the primary narrative action in Viken’s paintings; there are seven large works in the show. Viken establishes the action with body language. For the most part, the figures in her paintings are stationary and forward facing, with eyes that swell like pregnant bellies. Because Viken has hung her paintings low on the wall—inches above the floor—the eyes of her characters will meet the eyes of most viewers straight on. The effect is disarming. The simple act of lowering the canvases seems to give the paintings more presence in the room.

With a single exception, the figures in Viken’s paintings appear against fields of darkness. The effect is something like flash photography at night, when the subject is near the camera and everything else fails to receive light and vanishes into black. Consequentially, the depth of field is shallow. Even when the figures are scaled to different sizes, they remain on the same frontal plane. The compression of the physical space correlates with a chronological compression that collapses narrative sequences into a single scene. It gives Viken’s paintings an oddly dreamlike quality.

Consider the duck-billed corn-bearer in Midnight Activity 5 (2022) that is wagging a cob as it moves its legs while birthing a creature from a wound in its abdomen. One eye looks out at the viewer; one points in the direction of the many-breasted naked woman whose legs are splayed and whose bright pink crotch is accentuated by a fish the color of slime, algae, and mucus. She could be the wolf mother to the Roman twins of myth—Romulus and Remus—who may be represented as the twin devils gamely exiting the scene at lower left and right. It would all whirl with carnivalesque fun were it not for the sad dog in the red bandana, whose downcast appearance arouses sympathy and compassion.

Amidst one-eyed bunnies and bug-eyed figures in pigtails and bright bows, the sad dog is further distinguished because it’s not looking outwards. It gazes inwards, as if in contemplation. And the dog is only partially in the painting at all. Whereas the rest of the scene occurs completely within the bounds of the canvas, the dog is cropped, a portion of its body out of the frame, like it’s making an exit. The dog, it seems, has had enough.

A booklet produced for the exhibition showcases the artist’s graphite drawings, which are rather large and give a sense of her practice beyond painting. What’s immediately apparent is that her mind unspools these visions intuitively and her hand moves with a fierce quickness. The drawings are not sketches for the paintings: they aren’t made as preparation. They are realized as the paintings are—through discovery—and they embody the shared qualities of mischief and cheer that are so profoundly expressed in the works on view.

In the booklet there is a poem by Lord Byron, “She Walks in Beauty,” from 1814. Its opening stanza proposes that the finest aspects of night are gathered in the eyes of she who walks in beauty. Of course, that which is beautiful in daylight is often less so in the moonlight, and Viken’s canvases are replete with moons. The sense of solidarity amongst the girlish figures sporting pigtails and hairbows gives the collective action a kind of party atmosphere, as if they all are walking in beauty.