Ola Rindal: Sudden
5 February–3 April 2010, Brussels
Ola Rindal, Sudden, Catherine Bastide gallery, exhibition view, 2010
Sudden
At first sight, it is the pearly atmosphere many of the photographs are filled with that holds one’s attention.
A snow-covered road at night, some grey-shaded faces or trees that seem to be fading away, a woman figure appearing and disappearing irresolutely behind a bus window, … and often a diffuse light, hazy at times, which relentlessly undermines the outlines and shrouds the motif in an aura of indefiniteness.
Although the title of the exhibition, Sudden, inevitably evokes immediacy, impromptu, or surprise, here it leaves us in a state of uncertainty.
Drawing from a wide pictorial miscellany, Ola Rindal further uses different dimensions and printing methods for each photograph, which is enough to deny the setting up of any linear narrative. Thus there can be no linear reading – a way to avoid getting it all mapped out when we look at the pictures. On the contrary, there is a willingness to preserve the very potential of the images, with all their distinctive spontaneity.
For if the moment of an action always shows something caught on-the-spot, Rindal’s photos are essentially such that some kind of double-trigger effect takes place. Although the subjects stand “rooted to the ground”, they somehow look as if they were floating within rather indeterminate ambiances, ambivalent situations seemingly stock-still and yet hovering. As a result, one’s visual impression is kept insecure, as nothing appears to be really assured.
The scenes captured by the photographer instill an ominous feeling that something has just happened, or is about to happen. Some sort of restrained violence endows the picture with efficient energy, even more so since the possibility – or probability –of a continuation we won’t ever know anything about instantaneously occurs. In Ola Rindal’s work the image, far from revealing its secrets, expresses itself with an uncertainty that eventually makes intensely present what is never represented.
Frédéric BONNET
