Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter

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The more overtly erotic of Rødland's tinge the others with innuendo, a suspicious perfume, making even chaste photographs fill with “content,” engorge on ripeness of its meaning. Touch, of all kinds, becomes charged with the sex of the inert.
As with Ethridge, the erotic exists in the uncomfortable voids that fashion photography - that it often looks like - lapses, the spaces that don’t fit into normalized categories, between normative systems, yet becoming. Filling an image with too much content, it becomes erotic, engorged, lacking the blank homogeneity of Movie Star beauty, and confusing the two with slightness - the deckled face of a girl, the black banana - posing problems for categorical restrictors like the MPAA for which Rødland presents a real European nightmare of divergent cultural normativity. Most of the photos are G or PG but feel PG-13, and while the penis is R it’s the sneakers on the otherwise nude man that really require Parental Guidance, gorge yourself upon them.


See too : Torbjørn Rødland at Kunstahall Stavanger , Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy , Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger



The PR’s refusal to acknowledge the sexual themes leaves the perverts guessing. Erotic coupling, miscegenation of binary masculine/feminine, phallic/soft. Everything touching, lightly. Black butterflies suckling split bananas opened nectar. Spire’s gape like saddled into stirrups. This into that. Penetrating weave of wicker threaded with ticklish horsehair. Oh me oh my. Porcelain lighting on fragile goosepimpled legs, secured into stout kneepad’s digital camo. One thing into the other. “Our wedding,” the coupling, the light caressing of a face. The slit orange’s tufts.

“Comparing a sock to a vagina is OK, it’s done all the time, but you’d have to be insane to compare a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas [...] Salvador Dali, in attempting to reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about the rhinoceros horn; [...] But when he starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the presence of madness.” - D+G