LAST DEFENCE By Reinhardt Søbye

Concerning the technique: This is a perennial divide for me as an artist because this is my first exhibition since I migrated from classical drawing and painting to the digital medium. Therefore, let me introduce this new technique: By utilizing high speed processors, digital cameras, high-resolution scanners, digitizer tablets and large format printers I juggle all kinds of visual ingredients and let these blend on-screen to form experimental narratives. Sometimes as subtle, lithe visual poetry other times as photojournalistic notes. When I approach something my eyes approve and my soul grasps it is stored and printed. Thereafter, and this may be the part of the process that elevates the picture from the journalistic and illustrative to the incomprehensible mysterious presence of art, I draw and accentuate details on top of the print, or baste it with olive oil and continue painting, scraping, spattering, bending, braking – the whole time freezing the process by photographing the results. These snapshots go back into the machine and the process continues. I soon realized that the prints I worked manually upon became one-of-a-kind originals which possessed the extra resonance that made them sing. Such are the pictures that are being shown now in Toho gallery. All the pictures are manually processed and I could meticulously repeat the process, however it would be practically impossible to produce identical duplicates.
The last defence: I have always found it hard to deconstruct the content of my own pictures. This difficulty has increased due to the growing complexity and the number of visual voices in each work. Therefore I forge three markers in the hope that in this finite and bound area there sits a small bird whose song can be heard through the high grass with the help of the eyes seeing upon these works.
William Blake: For the better part of fifty years William Blake was a witness for god, society and art in a Great Britain buckling under the pressure of industrial and population growth which resulted in the slave-state and London east end described in Oliver Twist; children of only five or six were sold as labour and made to work up to eighteen hours a day in the factories. It was a vampire’s feast, and who can claim that the world of today escapes the very same iron fist? Blake wrote: “Poverty is the fools staff waiting to cane his own back” and “God created man content and wealthy, but the shrewd have made the innocent poor”. Blake sought to find the causative roots to the tyranny over the poor; to Blake all tyranny was an offence toward the intellect. Blake also wrote: “Money, the great satan or the great reason, is the root of good and evil in the ways of sin. Good and evil are wealth and poverty, the tree of misery. Where there is money involved art cannot be created – only war”. Blake held that the only way to upheave the evils of society is to cultivate the social virtues of man; love, forgiveness and fraternity “He, who sees the infinite in all things, sees god. He, who only sees ratio, sees only himself. Therefore god becomes what we are so that we may become what he is”
The plague: After the second scourge of the black plague upon Europe the population was severely decimated, this manifested immediate social and economic changes. Before the plague Europe was encumbered by overpopulation and all economic interchangeable resources where long since frozen in hierarchical power- and realty-structures. The ones who had property, had a lot of it, and those that had little or nothing were at the mercy of the property holders, they were barely paid enough for their labour to maintain life and health. In effect a bona fide slavery. The owners defined themselves through aristocracy, culture and a distorted biblical rhetoric as a separate superior race with the right and duty to rule after their own whims. After the decimation of the plague the balance of power was upturned, the labour force was scarce and subsequentially great expanses of land lay unclaimed. The workers turned their backs on the toil and slavery and began working for themselves, thus they became economically independent. The establishment saw this as a serious threat; their way of life and accumulation of riches was dependent on the underpaid work of others, as their income decreased, the extravagancy and violent power-structures were undermined resulting in increased wages and a higher level of self-awareness and confidence in the working class. To begin with the powers to be, or the king, attempted to issue decrees forbidding raising wages, this turned out to be a practical impossibility. After this they attempted to gain mindshare by abolishing the death penalty, striking debt that under other circumstances resulted in incarceration and reducing the definition of crime and the execution of justice.
Roy Andersson: Roy Andersson, maker of the highly acclaimed “Songs from the second floor” from 2000. In an essay originally from 1995 Andersson presents a thought-provoking text on contemporary times which he claims is defined by a fear of that which is serious. To Andersson seriousness is not the opposite of jocularity, but of indifference. Seriousness according to Andersson illustrates the complexity of man, that which demands reflection, knowledge and perspective. The cry for seriousness is brought about by ethical reasons; humanity must in its own name approach seriousness to counter the evils of modern time. “I believe that the horrid potential for atrocity and evil displayed during world war two is something we still carry with us, along with our latent predispositions for myth, prejudice, superstition, shortsightedness, memoryloss, antiintellectualism, bigotry and sentimentality – in short; the bricks and mortar of evil”. In another interview he states: “When Sweden reached its great economic collapse there was a general feeling that there was no need to educate the youth, or to stimulate intellectual activity. They would have to beg for the positions anyway. The cynicism and defeatist attitude is disconcerting and is rooted in lack of belief and hopes for the future. The inherent chaos in the economical mindset results in a world so complicated that even experts are unsure of the state of things or of things to come. The world is in a state of feeding frenzy of American standards, where quarterly fiscal income is the only objective, and every minute move demands detailed reports. In this way we loose sight of the long term perspectives.” ” Q: The way you use long, single-shot scenes without cuts - and don't move the camera within them - is particularly unusual these days. A: Normally when you see a film with many cuts, it's to avoid problems, because of lack of money, patience, and talent. If you don't move the camera and don't cut, you have to enrich the picture in deep focus - that's what you have. I think a good theoretical writer on film is Andre Bazin - he preferred deep focus. I do too. When you look at the history of paintings, they're in deep focus all the time, and that makes you very curious, and you become an active spectator. Q: Let's talk about the themes of the film. It captures a very millennial sense of things slipping out of control. A: Yes. There are many themes in it, but one is that the short-term perspective lets things slip out of control. We don't control the stock market, for example - it's a lottery. We are building our civilisation on a lottery system. I think in the long run, things have to be more planned. It doesn't sound good, a planned economy, you think of Stalinism and so on, but there is no alternative.” The indifferent human behaviour is like a combination of lack of competence with manners of superiority; “the randomness of decision is a consequence of lack of knowledge and the absence of a united thought- and value system, and above all the ignorance of these shortcomings”. Roy Andersson appears to be a spokesman for the seriousness of art, which also has humour, and the loving human with all it entails.
I dedicate this exhibition to my little son Edvard (4) and to Mr. and Mrs. Nakaoka for their love of art, the drive and will to realize this exhibition. Reinhardt Søbye 2003