Lena Trydal is known for figurative paintings based on photographs, or perhaps she is better described as notorious. When mentioned by critics, it's usually in negative terms. Recently she heard that a teacher at one of Oslo's art schools had described her as a painter who isn't interesting. What is it about Trydal's work that is so provocative?

One critical objection is that Trydal's use of colour, perspective, light and composition can bring to mind an amateur painter's work, the kind of paintings sold at tourist destinations, featuring horses, flowers or sunsets. This is no coincidence. Trydal finds such mass-produced paintings highly interesting. She is preoccupied with their compositions, colour choicesand the way the brush moves across the canvas. She strives for this aesthetic as a deliberate method, using photographs as source material, preferably older amateur digital photos, characterised by flatness and garish colours, by fleshy or plastic-like human skin, incorrect focus and distorted contrasts. Her subjects are places, interiors and people who are not perfect. She is fascinated by the popular, by what is considered bad taste, and by what falls outside prevailing norms and trends.

In the exhibition Arguineguín, all of this comes together. The exhibition's name is taken from a small town on Gran Canaria, a place she was brought to on family holidays as a child. She has fond memories of these trips, and paints her way into how she experienced the place back then, using various source material. Some of the paintings in the exhibition are based on Trydal's own holiday photos, while others draw their motifs from photographs freely available on Google.

Arguineguín is a good example of what we call "Syden" (a Norwegian term for southern holiday destinations). Just over five thousand people live permanently in the small town, but many of these are Norwegians. Here you'll find the Norwegian School, the Norwegian health centre Valle Marina, a medical centre with Norwegian doctors, the Norwegian Club, and Norwegian shops and bars. One can stay in the town for a long time without having to engage with local culture at all.

Syden tends to be regarded as a form of low culture, a mass holiday where one travels to the place "everyone else" travels to, typically on a charter flight, to a standardised tourist resort. It is particularly this standardisation that causes Syden to be looked down upon. It matters little whether one is in Mallorca, Crete or Gran Canaria, the hotel, the pool, the beach, the bar and the buffet make up the same holiday package. In Syden, consumption takes precedence over cultivation. Here is sun, alcohol, food, shopping, swimming pools, relaxation, swimwear, partying, plastic, charter hotels, buffets, Norwegian menus, souvenir shops, charter flights and drunk Scandinavians. Syden has become a symbol of not having chosen anything exclusive, authentic or intellectually interesting.

And here we return to Trydal's paintings. In her artist statement, Trydal cites Caravaggio, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet as sources of inspiration. These were artists who painted sex workers, street children and labourers, using figurative painting to turn the art audience's gaze toward the unwanted and the low-cultural elements of society, toward that which one would rather not see, certainly not in a painting. Today, perhaps we must turn to Syden to find something equally taboo and untouched within figurative painting: something we know is out there, but that we don't really wish to look at more closely.

Trydal works between art history's frames of reference and traditions on one hand, and a wealth of visual signs and motifs drawn from Syden on the other. She explores the splits between the aesthetic she learned to love as a child and the aesthetic demands that contemporary art imposes.

Trydal's paintings are painted with love, while at the same time the artist understands that what she paints may be perceived as comical or ugly. In this way, her works point back at the cultural system she is part of, an art world that helps determine what counts as good taste, what one ought to allow oneself to paint, and, not least, in what manner.

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The exhibition is supported by Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond (BKV) and Fritt Ord

Press (Norwegian):

Avisen KRS: Lena Trydal åpner ny utstilling

NRK Sørlandet: Provoserte med kongebilde (…)

Fædrelandsvennen: Kongeprovokatøren vender hjem

NRK Radio: Intervju fra 1.50 Sydenkunst i Kr.sand

Fædrelandsvennen: Sydenturen som sydenpop

Klassekampen: Perspektiv