Projects | Double Blind

Feral drop Kick II (detail), 2016
Intaglio, monoprint
18 x 24 inches

crater blown out by a fertilizer car bomb that a far-right terrorist set off in front of the Government Quarters in Oslo, Norway. (Notoriously, the killer then headed to a Labor Party youth camp on Utøya, where he shot dead 69 participants). Both took place in 2011 but continue to resonate as time passes: on the one hand, as Occupy Sandy in the form of First Aid in the storm’s aftermath in 2012, and in the heady choreography of the Black Lives Matter movement; and, on the other, copycat gunmen in Christchurch, New Zealand; El Paso, Texas; and Bærum, Norway (and possibly, Buffalo, New York, in 2022). To these, Røgeberg has added aerial views of the 44th and 45th U.S. Presidential Inaugurations in a 2019 series of paintings titled “zerosandones.” Sometimes a “scene” takes the form of a figure, disrupted like the cityscapes—such as Delacroix’s Liberty, with her distinctive triumphant gesture made barely legible, a gesture whose inflection may flip polarity from one iteration to the next.% “9th of February to 24th of October” from 2014 is from Akershus Fortress in Oslo, where her grandfather, a member of the Norwegian resistance, was shot by the German forces in the last days of the World War II occupation, and where Vidkun Quisling, whose name became synonymous with traitor, was executed by a Norwegian firing squad months later. We can imagine our histories began long before we were born then, for example in the “catastrophe” of a grandfather’s death. Røgeberg shakes the continuity of this history, by creating a disrupted view that is the present-day.

Røgeberg’s latest series , with the punning title “Double Blind,” comprises a set of drawings and monotypes which, as she gazes at her sources, she executes blindly, with her two unwatched hands creating abstracted views facing one another, a Rorschach with damaged symmetry.& A variation on the gesture drawing, situated, as she wrote, in the “present tense of my eye-hand coordination,” the exercise is meant to find something that lies “in the gutter between intent and result.”% In these works, we peer at the abstracted tangle of lines, recognizing that shapes and configurations on the two sides echo one another but are unable to make them match. Unless we already know the source, it is likewise difficult to reconcile the drawing with the source image. Indeed, the emotional valence of the works lies partly in the failure of representation to cohere tidily.

In the case of Zucotti Park, Røgeberg’s process is not unlike that of the protesters, who created a “living megaphone” wherein they relayed through the crowd the words of speakers who did not then need microphones or megaphones, which were illegal. The words thus became more fully a part of the bodies of the protesters who uttered and re-uttered them, as a collective, understanding them actively and yet with the particularity—the voice, the inflection—of the individual. Similarly, we feel the events Røgeberg depicts via her body, in the stuttering lines and occasional blots, an “enunciation” proceeding, as she would argue, through empathy. The very process involves coping with physical inadequacy. She is left-handed, so the left side in the ink drawings is often larger and more assured than

Colorado rabbit, 2013
Oil on linen
16 x 14 inches

the right, an equation that is flipped in the monotypes, subject to the reversal of the matrix. The whole endeavor accepts inherent failure, a relinquishing of control, as the drawing registers a spasmodic-looking response. Yet the action is redeemed as a wholly new image. We sense in its provisionality that another try will bring with it a different image trailing within itself different traces of the inspiring event, an ongoing forensic action that can bring no resolution. “I think my painting happened when I became aware of repeating what I was trying to avoid,” she has said.

Among Røgeberg’s interferences are the fur pelts of various animals that she began painting around 2010. At first they were recognizable as such, hides of a reindeer, rabbit or sheep that occupied the front picture plane and nearly the entirety of the frame—some closely observed, lush with texture, as in Big White (2010) or Colorado Rabbit (2013), others more abstract, as in Big Brown (2010), more like a giant stain or blot. However altered in each treatment, the basic shape of the pelt, an absent body with truncated arms and legs, recurs, and once we understand the syntax, we are able to see it. Some of the works are quite large, more than eight feet at their biggest dimension, placing the pelt—whether whole or fragmented—in direct confrontation with a viewer, both larger than life and human scale. Having migrated to the foreground of the historical scenes, the painted pelts are aggressively pressed into the surface from another canvas as a baffle—a representation increasingly removed from its source. Here blotchy, elsewhere smeared and seemingly flying across our view like an agitated specter (Rebound Extrovert, 2013, for example), the degraded pelts allow us to see only the periphery of what lies behind and beneath, faint and blurry as a Gerhard Richter landscape, something the eye must excavate. Røgeberg has told me that she sometimes intends her intervention with these pelts as a kind of protective gesture, covering the Zuccotti demonstration, for example, like a blanket—tenderly. Though often large, her paintings project an air of discretion, enforcing a kind of politeness, even respectfulness, toward what we are “witnessing.” Yet the surfaces are in real turmoil, sometimes thick with blotted paint and active brushwork, a materialization of the empathic response of the maker, and, by extension, the viewer.

Røgeberg’s interest in slowing an easy read has found a natural outlet in printmaking, where reversal of form and compression of space can be exploited for purposes of disruption, even as she indulges the fluidity of her hand. Working at 10 Grand Press with master printer Marina Ancona over the past six years, Røgeberg has created series of works in intaglio and monotype. Significantly, she began in 2016 with a series based loosely on soccer kicks in which two disembodied human legs enter the image from left and right and then are more or less interrupted by the familiar pelt shape, which has here become an animal-like form being “kicked” across and through the picture plane like a weird ball,

Rebound Extrovert, 2013
Oil on canvas
8 x 7 feet

but functioning as a giant splatter that lends the image a violent undertone: truly the “dispersed affect of the pelt,” as the painter Bordo described it.( Røgeberg recognized that monotype, with its sensuous, slippery gestures resembling a child’s finger- painting, can effectively convey a feeling of immediacy, even intimacy, despite its final operation at a remove from the direct hand of the artist: it is at once near and far, Røgeberg’s version of home.

The most recent series of monotypes carries the unbalanced symmetry of the earlier paired legs much further, allowing the imperfect left-right mirroring of those blind-drawn sites to unfold as if before our eyes in a welter of marks that can range from the brutal, staccato debris of the bomb site to ribbony trails raking the ink of an aerial shot. A long, sinuous line opens into the vast, barren distances of a drone view of Ukraine. A moody, luminous ground, printed in the subtle inks that are Ancona’s specialty, brings the earth to the surface like mud, at once asserting and deflecting the dissociative technology of modern warfare. Figures materialize only to unravel in the nervous colored tangles that constitute them, and rational perspective comes undone. In this, the monotypes accomplish, for a time, the ongoing task that Røgeberg has set herself over more than a decade: to allow her, and the viewer, to glimpse with physical certitude the manmade ruins of history. Ever provisional, such understanding must be the way to move forward.

Hanneline Røgeberg, “Studio Conversation with Robert Bordo,” in Hanneline Røgeberg: Never Odd or Even (New York: Blackston Gallery, 2013), n.p.
“Hanneline Røgeberg in Conversation with Siri Hustvedt,” ACNE Paper, Spring 2010.
Ibid.
Benjamin quotes are from Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project,
trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McCaughlin, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).
Glenn Ligon, Off the Bone, (New York: Blackston Gallery, 2015).
Hanneline Røgeberg, “Double Blind,” 2022, unpublished essay.
Hustvedt and Røgeberg.
Røgeberg, “Studio Conversation with Robert Bordo.”