Borring and the Landscape Painting

by Tore Kierulf Næss.
Catalogue Preface to the Exhibition at Gallery Tonne, October 2004

In art history, the origin of landscape painting is attributed to a small group of painters who in the second half of the 1840s congregated in the vicinity of the small village of Barbizon on the outskirts of the Fontainebleau forest north of Paris. Prior to this, there was a long tradition of painters drawing sketches and painting studies under the open skies. However the Barbizon painters led by Theodore Rousseau, insisted on carrying both easel and canvas outdoors, ideally completing their pieces on site, in front of their motifs. The idea being that this procedure would add life and a richness to the paintings which would not be possible when painting from sketches and studies at home in the studio.

The ideals of the open air landscape painting, of creating a canvas by means of continuous dialogue with the subject matter, gained a large following through both the era of realism and that of impressionism. Nevertheless, when realist painting again surfaced on the established art scene, after abstractionism felt spent around 1960, the landscape aspect was by and large a forgotten discipline. Neorealists often had a background as commercial artists, and used photographs as source material, or they painted constructed scenes straight from their imaginations. This approach to realistic figuration has in many ways sustained itself right up to the pluralistic situation we entertain today, where the byword is that anything goes.
Thus it is interesting when a painter such as Arne Borring revitalises the realistic painting, not just through realistic figuration, but by way of a painting practice in which the canvas is created in keeping with a continual, and sometimes drawn-out interplay with a decisive locality and the view pertaining to it. In other words he is endeavouring nothing less than waking the open air landscape painting after a spell of hibernation that has lasted a good hundred years.

Evidently, Arne Borring experiences this form of interplay with nature as something fundamentally meaningful. Otherwise he would hardly have endured being on station day out and day in, in all sorts of weather, week after week. Additionally this may also be perceived as an indication that to paint a painting with a point of departure in a continually observational mode de emploi, the way Borring does, is far from solely mechanically rendering what one sees. Rather one would assume that in the course of the days, weeks or months it takes Borring to complete his work, a triangular relationship arises, between the landscape, the painting and himself, where all these three bodies interact as independent and equal, if not equi-potent, partners.
When Borring says that he "adds a last lick of paint at home in his studio to assure himself that he hasn't been outsmarted or dazzled by reality" this is an expression of how his motif, the painting and he himself have to be attuned each in relation to the other. Neither are the landscapes Borring has painted left untouched after he has been there, if not from other reasons, then at least due to the three rings of red cadmium which mark the spots where Borring's easel has rested on the ground. .

Thematically, Borring enjoys concentrating on places where culture has left its mark, but where nature threatens to reclaim the landscape. This can for example incorporate a house in the process of falling apart, a rural road where vegetation is gaining the upper hand over road surface or simply a cultivated field crested on all sides by forest, reminding us of what covered all before the field was cleared, and what the field will return to if not continually weeded.
It seems only natural to interpret Borring's title for his current exhibition "Time flies, time bides" in connection with this nature vs. culture dichotomy. Perhaps both his paintings, and the landscapes he depicts, are places where time rests, like deep, still water or pools, where water remains motionless, even regresses, while the rest of the river races along on the outer edges.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Borring, with his project, has few, if any allies on the contemporary, established art scene. Given, there is prolific painting activity going on here and there, but not in the way in which he proceeds. Could it be that the premise which seem to underpin Borring's painting activities, the fact that painting from observation is meaningful in itself, and that the canvases which are born out of this process have an inherent ability to express something both important and valuable, is perhaps too daring for many young contemporary artists to give it a fling. This going it alone has almost certainly functioned well, and will probably function, as a failsafe for Borring's project in the first inning.

However, unusual talent, perfectly honed tradesmanship, ability to immerse oneself over long periods of time and exhaustive studies of nature, may some day in the future be reconstituted as meritorious qualities and activities for an artist. Should this happen, Borring will find himself considerable horse lengths ahead of his contemporaries when history is about to decide what will remain, and what will turn out not to be of much value once the dust has settled.

Tore Kierulf Næss