Stavanger, Norway
Magical realism is a literary and artistic genre that allows for the believable envisioning of unusual and impossible scenarios. It’s a useful lens through which to view two paintings by Nils Rostad, each of which takes retro technologies—a mic, a fan, maybe a blimp, definitely some electrical pylons—and through playing with scale and placement, makes of them something both familiar and utterly new. In “Fjellet (The Mountain),” liquid gold bubbles up from the ground, or maybe flows down into it, from a giant old-fashioned microphone propped up in the landscape at the base of a formidable peak. Someone, perhaps a singer, dangles up high in the sky on an unrecognizable contraption. One way or another, music is what’s powerful here. In “Das Neue Vifte,” a giant airborne blower banishes the rain clouds, leaving behind clear blue ether. Rostad explains the title as a play on words between German and Norwegian, but since I only speak French and English, I will take it another way, because vifte translates as fan, and fan means not only aerator but also devotee, as in sports fanatic. At the end of Rostad’s huge lime blower are red and yellow striped shapes that look, to my eye at least, a whole lot like abstracted football jerseys. He says they’re umbrellas, so I got it wrong, but maybe in magical realism, that can also be right.
—Lori Waxman, March 16, 6:15 PM