It is very difficult to find a phrase that could penetrate the number of layers that I believe most of us have built up, to preserve an illusion of normality or sense in the world. Or as Margaret Atwood put it, we could be ignorant, but to ignore; that takes work. Making art is to engage in another kind of work, namely that of not ignoring.
Artists, and especially young artists often have a seismic relation to the world. They receive and send out the world through a, often to them, foggy filter. When that work is finally done, the sum of all efforts often exceeds by far all the conscious and more intuitive decisions taken. The art piece rarely is about them at all, even if it still has everything to do with them.
When the minimalist painter Agnes Martin moved from the artistic epicentral of New York in 1967 to Taos in New Mexico, she created there a series of paintings, “With my back to the world”, that wanted to catch; “the fragility and tenderness of the morning”. It would be easy to understand that today, since being a young artist today means to navigate through an enormous number of parameters outside of those implying the creative act itself. The current state of the world is as we all know alarming.
Even so, looking at the totality of works presented in this show, they become a reminder of something different. Making art means insisting and trusting that new artworks have a capacity to be the canary in the coalmine, a piece of resistance, a motivator, or a space for wordless insights. It represents a cautious hope. In this show the students are sort of halfway through an education, but this does not mean that the works and their intent are half baked or unfinished, quite the opposite. A lot of the works gravitate around tenderness, fragility and attention, others are relational openly or in a more covert way. Many of the students claim their own universe, build a framework for it, and inhabit it with their works, others react more directly to the world and send it back to us to reconsider.
Agnes Martin’s strong belief was that; “Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings”. Looking at this show perhaps these concrete representations manifest something we really need now. Playfulness, attention, love, a claim for space- a reason to “catch the fragility and tenderness of the morning”.
Kristina Jansson
The Royal Institute of Art