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Lives and Works in Norway

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STATEMENT
My wish is that you stop and feel that I have invited you into a space that makes the time unimportant. My wish is that you will take some of that feeling with you, that some of the thoughts will be there. My wish is that you want to see the symbolism I so carefully have tried to master into my paintings.

The motives are important. I carefully select the items that can replace my thoughts. Then I try to find a light that makes my “portrait” live and interesting. Now I give them my full attention, give them a scene to be seen on. Not every item I paint has ever had that opportunity. Through the mirror you can see the items in another way, and the symbolic idea becomes stronger.

I am a slow painter that loves to work the color into the canvas, I don’t like shortcuts. Since I paint realism it is important to me that you can see the painting is painted. I try hard to give the items soul before perfection. I leave a bit of myself in the painting; make it human, with faults and uniqueness.Paintings by Jette van der Lende: Whispers in an empty amphitheater (2007)

ESSAY
Jette van der Lende’s realistic oils have the preternatural capacity to stop time. Or at least slow time down. In his novel Slowness Milan Kundera writes: “A word uttered in a small enclosed space has a different meaning from the same word resonating in an amphitheater. No longer is it a word for which he holds full responsibility and which is addressed exclusively to the partner, it is a word that other people demand to hear, people who are there, looking at them. True the amphitheater is empty, but even though it is empty, the audience, imagined and imaginary, potential and virtual, is there, is with them.” With van der Lende the scale of the works may be small and yet we as viewers seem to be witnessing the birth of something special, an object caught in a cat’s cradle of relations (optical and mental) with other objects and the space that envelops them. This artist has the uncanny ability to create visionary work that intimates the sacred souls and sacred lives of the circumstances of objects in the world.

The lucidity and control through which Jette van der Lende paints her seemingly modest objects and spaces create a deeply saturating auratic experience for the viewer. What might this aura cling to? It is clearly given over to the sensed experience of the artist. This experience triangulates between several aspects of creative activity of giving form and then giving life to form. The first aspect under scrutiny are her mental, ideational and ideological responses to the object or objects she depicts (their representation) as signifieds. Next are her sensations that are given form through the handling of her paint along the surface of her pictorial plane, including the layering and feathering of her colored brush strokes, the compositional structure, the balancing of hues and shadows. Finally one might consider the third aspect her emotional responses to her self, her mental condition and psychic disposition as she pictorially refers to her subjects as signifiers. This aspect of her vision takes into account the correspondences that are made as the artist begins and ends the activity of painting. Call this the Mallarmean aspect (we are referring here to the poet’s injunction to describe not the thing but the effect of the thing on the mind). The end result of course is the object that we as viewers see in its completed form, the finished painting.

The tri-partite activity, in unison, creates the artist’s sense experience which in turn creates the auratic condition under which we are moved by the painting’s presence. In Jette van der Lende’s case what the artist paints and how she paints conspires to create an experience that suggests the secret lives and the sacred souls of objects becoming manifest in time. Van der Lende is one of these surpassingly gifted visual creators who achieve a high level of distinction in creative terms: in a deliberative way she suggests the ongoing passing of life. Her paintings (particularly in her Georges de la Tour-like atmospheric works that appear to be lit from a single source) one senses flux as well as serenity. The viewer is transfixed by the intimation of the flowing of each moment saturating as flows the contours of her depicted objects and the spaces that berth them. Getting immersed and enmeshed in this artist’s work involves a reflection on what came to pass in the works’s coming-to-be. The artist’s painting experience incorporates her tracking of her “small sensations” (to swipe a phrase out of the Matissean notebook for a moment). Once this is done to her satisfaction she arrives at the culminating moment, the designated terminus point which signals the painting’s completion.

With her assertion on the ephemerally of the moment being recorded with such fidelity through her gossamer sense of light (natural light and the light of the sun, but also the light of fire’s embers…) it is no wonder that while the subjects of her work are varied: (for example, Three Blocks (2004) The Spirit of Freedom (2005), Protection Against Lies (2005), The Soul of Flower Death (2005)) van der Lende’s vision remains inviolate and pure. She speaks to us in a large amphitheater about small things but in a large way. And we are alone with her in this gigantic mental setting as she starts the wheels of consciousness turning. The presence of an intimate immensity saturates this artist modestly sized, yet exponentially loaded artworks. They convey a deeply felt and deeply held emotional experience. This is all the more so because of the memento-mori aspect of the work. The irrevocability and undeniability of time’s passing is foremost and center in the artist’s mind as she depicts her objects. In this respect Van der Lende’s capacity to mimetically re-present the world through her chosen visual vignettes is haunting and bracing. Life is Protected, for example, a recent oil that showcases the depiction of an egg as a glowing orb next to a fragment of a cracked white shell, brings everything home: the proof of internal strength is the capacity to be, to co-exist, with our vulnerability.

Jette van der Lende creates slow artworks that bespeak of great things in intimate detail. Her artworks serve as mirrors to us, reflecting timeless internal configurations of the self, imitating in some manner models in an external world, but also proudly defining the mirror as if only subservient to the Idea that Oscar Wilde defines as: “it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors”.
D.F. Colman – an art writer based in Manhattan.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2015
Appleton Museum of Art, FL, September 1th – October 31th
R.W. Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport, LA, May 19th – July 26th
Riflessismo’s International Exhibition, Kongsvinger, May 13th – May 24th

2014
Robert Lange Studios, Charleston SC. November 7th – 28th
Eiffel-Tower, Paris October 23rd
World Museum Liverpool, July 3rd – 6th

2013
Riflessio in Arezzo June 29th – July 14th
The Lloyd Gill Gallery in UK, April 13th – May 10th
Kolben by the Art Society of Oppegård in March

2012
Chianciano Art Museum, International Art Award -” Art of the Mind” 15th – 22nd September
Gagliardi Gallery in London 27.April – 5.May

2011
The Chianciano Biennale, 13-27 September in Tuscany Italy
New Art Center, ArtLook. Bookrelease and exhibition December 27 – 31.

2010
The publication Contemporary Art Watch ArtLook deputing 25 November at The New Art Center
Arts Festival in October, in New York
CanCan, exhibition in New Art Centre, New York in January

2009
The Annual Fashion District Art Festival at New Art Center Oct. 16 to Oct. 18.
New Art Center, New York
Galleri Galtung, Norway
Gulden Kunstverk, Norway

2008
First International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Chapingo 08, “Art with Root in the Earth”
In Chapingo, Texcoco, Estado de México,
Østlandsutstillingen, (national juried exhibition), in eastern Norway and Lübeck Germany
Trudy Labell Fine Art Gallery, Naples, Florida
Scottsdale Fine Art Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona

2007
SmallWorks – The Greenwich Workshop, Connecticut
Scan, exhibition in New Art Center, New York
Biennale EMMA (European Masters of Modern Art) in Burgau, Austria.

2006
Palm Art Award Exhibition, Leipzig, Germany

2005
Biennale Florence, Florence, Italy
Østlandsutstillingen, (national juried exhibition), in eastern Norway and Kiel Germany
Oppegård Art Society, Norway
Veritas, Oslo, Norway

2004
Agora Gallery, Chelsea, New York

1999
Represented Norway in Winsor and Newtons worldwide millennium competition.

AWARDS

2011
2.prize at the Biennale Chianciano, given by The European Confederations of Art Critics

2010
Palm Art Award – Certificate of Excellence – given for outstanding quality and originality of her Art.
ART NOW3 diploma of excellence – honorable award
Selected for the participation to the 1st international award of painting, sculpture and graphics City of New York
1BINNIAL of contemporary art, diploma of excellence – honorable award

2009
9th Female Artist’s Art Annual, “diploma of excellence” – honourable award

2007
1. prize of EMMA (European Masters of Modern Art)
Palm Art Award – Merit Award – given in recognition an appreciation of the outstanding originality of her Art.

MEMBERSHIPS

The Association of Norwegian Visual Artists, Oslo, Norway
Danish association of Visual Artists
CAN, New York, NY
International Guild of Realism, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA

LIBRARY

2015 – 2016
Masters of the Realistic Imagery, Who is who in visual Art

2013
Women in Art, by Oliver and Reinhard Fuchs

2011
Selected to be presented in “Best of Worldwide Still Life Artists Volume I book competition”.
2011 – Italian Arte
2011 – ArtLook, CAN
2011 – International Encyclopaedic dictionary of modern and contemporary art. International Academy Santarita
2011 – International Dictionary of Artists, WWAB
who’s who in visual art. Art Domain

2010
Quotations catalog. casa Editrice
2010 – Avanguardie Artistiche. Centro Diffisione Arte
2010 – International Register of Painters and Sculptors. Italia in Arte
who’s who in visual art. Art Domain

2009
Article in International Artist Magazine no.70
2009 – Article in “Kunst for Alle” now “Kunst” In Norway
who’s who in visual art. Art Domain

2008
who’s who in visual art. Art Domain
La estetica y el arte contemporaneo. Atcultura

2007
SEETAL