Minus Theatre workshop 5/8/2015 used Odd Nerdrum’s paintings as material for theatre to copy and learn from, imitate and express.
What we are looking for is what this young girl is holding in a painting by Guillermo Lorca García-Huidobro:
It is a handful of expressive brushstrokes or gestures. Or a handful of paint. Or even tones of paint.
Nerdrum called himself a kitsch painter for being committed “to the eternal: love, death and the sunrise.” Returning from the repression of modernism sentimentality, passion, pathos and art in its most primitive sense as the virtues of craft.
Jenny Saville’s work is also interesting for the exundancy of the flesh which recalls the powers of distortion Francis Bacon said he gleaned from Pablo Picasso. (Gleaning, as in the film by Agnès Varda, is also an inspiration for Minus.) But here again, it is probably a question of the expressive force of painting causing the flesh to overflow, in which the flesh participates as overflowing. The tension might in Saville’s painting be the stylistic stretch between Egon Schiele and Bacon (which is also between drawing and painting). Here rather in a photographic collaboration with Glenn Luchford than in her painting:
And in its painterly/graphic aspect, where the paint or tone explodes from the head (a theme literalised elsewhere in her oeuvre). And this explosion resembles what Minus is gleaning, or stealing, from the girl above–a handful of capacity or potential:
