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AS SOMETHING BECOMES
There is a corporeal presence in Hanne Friis’s works. In the objects, this presence is woven together with all the processes that have left their mark on the material, and, in the drawings, moving organic patterns create associations to the inner and outer topography of the human being. In this way, Hanne Friis’s art is driven by paradoxes. The amorphous, twisted, and tangled structures are finished, and astonishingly precise, but they are also on a path towards becoming. They radiate a greedy energy, yet at the same time they are painfully present in their own coming to be, as if they are on the verge of bursting.
In her previous objects, to be sure, Hanne Friis made use of things and materials one might associate with non-artistic realms – things such as latex gloves, nylon stockings, and various textiles. Nonetheless, the functional references to such loaded readymades, rich in associations as they are, never played an important part in her art. What’s more interesting is that the materials have torn themselves loose, and have persisted on more or less independent terms. In the new works, Hanne Friis has really opened up to the possibilities of this inherent quality, and begins quite simply with the textiles direct from the roll. That more neutral way of beginning a project liberates her from taking along traces and memories connected to a specific sphere of use. Instead, it yields a multitude of possibilities for an abstracted approach, and it makes possible a direct and physical dialog with the material itself. Structures and surfaces arise for the first time – foreign and, in a fascinating way, recognizable in all their corporeal and sensual appearances.
Hanne Friis’s art expresses equilibria between control and anarchy. It safeguards something well known, and it keeps the darker aspects of our existence in check. The corporeality that permeates everything suggests visible and invisible drama, like when an insidious illness lies in wait, or when a life-affirming desire becomes so violent that it almost can’t be held back. Hanne Friis makes use of a concrete and material reality in order to get closer to a mentally abstract space, where what doesn’t permit itself to be captured by language nonetheless reveals itself in small glimpses of hope. In the concrete, the inexpressible can also be made out.
Hanne Friis works with an art form that takes time. In the objects’ compact textile layers, time is folded and drawn together. And the drawings spread themselves out over the paper in the same slow way, like cells and tissue in transitions as fine as hair, between ease and unease. In this way, the temporal aspect becomes tactile in the countless repetitions and variations. With Hanne Friis, time is allowed to become physically visible in structures that contain the possibility for both pain and joy.
This is a form of art where there is an unmistakable presence of the hand. At the same time, the works give the impression of denying the centrality of handicraft. It is as if Hanne Friis, via the engagement of the hands, also has set the works free – they are what they are single-handedly. It is precisely that characteristic that contributes to their giving a palpable impression of being living organisms. Every single one of them possesses a bodily identity. This has in large measure to do with the peculiar tension in which her art exists – between the intimate and the monstrous.
One is enticed and repelled, as if there is an underlying pulse that drives one to admit both these extremes. Hanne Friis manages to get her art to fall into the complex intervening space where oppositions arise in parallel. On the one hand, her works are extremely beautiful and visually compelling, and she is certainly is not shy about decorative aspects; on the other hand, this also makes possible a raw expressive form and a subtle repulsiveness. The works are brutal, raw, vulgar, and seductive.
It is easy to imagine how tempting it is to reach out your hand in order to touch the surface of one of the rugged objects. This is almost as forbidden as touching the skin of someone you don’t know. And like that irresistible, yet also questionable need – in that mere second before the touch becomes a reality, Hanne Friis’s art unfolds. A pregnant fragment of time is immediately felt as present.
Anne Karin Jortveit |
