The Neutral: In Motion Artist Statement Considering a color that is less of a color than white. Choosing grey.

The color of lifelessness, so dull and grey. The shades of grey muddling my work for weeks, then slowly, developing more clearly with the silver grey and the mysterious shadow shade called neutral tint. From that mysterious shadow, I abstracted the purple, for the neutral tint is not what one might at first consider to be a typical grey shade but a combination of ultramarine blue and earthy red ochre. So really a bluish darkness with a whisper of a purple hue, the shadow color. There was a link between the purple and the grey as colours created by a mixture of extremes, the red and the blue and the white and the black. Equally ambiguous: the restless purple and the bleak motionless gray. When in motion, the Neutral becomes a voyage without a destination. Each destination dissolved by the motion. It is the underlying fragment connecting all the uncertainties and inconsistencies in our lives. It is an atopia, a place without borders, that flows everywhere. It takes place without taking place. The works; paintings, photographs, Xeroxes, drawings on paper, and motion projections on the wall, are of variable sizes. They are combined on the wall as a fragmented whole. Like the fragmented glimpses that make up our experiences. The erratic memories of events and places; always incomplete and never whole. The Neutral is put into motion. Three different projections of the same somewhat abstract movement in black and white, each varying in length. Here the place of installation is the underlying structure, the element of a whole. It is the air, the song and the silence. Defining the undefined the neutral white wall. A negative becomes a positive. The back may shift to the front. The emptiness is a pause that carries possibilities within its muted presence. The paintings are as residues of something long since evaporated from the surfaces. Like a distorted silver-gelatin print in the form of a painting, they feel empty and deprived. What we see are the possible remnants of what was, if it ever was. We see stains, bleaches, spots and outlines; concentrated edges with a vapory middle or a centered play of formless shadows with worn edges. There are multiple layers, sometimes hardly detected through the denseness of the top layer, while others clearly expose the ground beneath a vague surface. There are conscious mishaps; revealing holes and spills left to dry amongst controlled strokes of paint.

The Neutral is put into motion. Stirring up the surface, the peelable neutral layers revealing the purple and the muted gray, the bluish dark shadow, the silver and the stained white. The Neutral is in motion. The provocative neutral calls everything into question. It frustratingly defeats any one explanation. There is no conclusion.

is the Neutral really a breachable, peelable surface, behind which richness, color, strong meaning, hide? (Cf. The unconscious, is it really what hides behind the conscious?). - Roland Barthes, The Neutral

March 2007 in Reykjavk Hulda Stefnsdttir