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TERJE FAGERMO
To call Terje Fagermo an autodidact would have to be a strongly qualified statement. It’s true that he did not follow the usual path through art school, but neither is he an amateur who appeared out of nowhere. His father, Ole Fagermo (1904–78), was a painter and commercial artist and the son studied under him. An older brother was also a painter and Terje began working with visual art while still in his teens. It goes without saying that the sophisticated technical skill that his artistic production evinces would not have been possible without expert instruction from an early age.
Terje Fagermo became an established artist in his local milieu during the 1970s, but to this day few people outside of Ålesund are familiar with his work. One might conclude from this that the artist has adapted his idiom to suit a local audience. For a local inhabitant it would certainly be his representations of the unique character of his hometown that might have played a role in arousing a response. And yet Fagermo’s work belongs to a type of painting that is widespread and independent of geographical origin. Fagermo’s paintings are both artistically, and in choice of motif, rooted in an amalgamation of local references and the leading art trends during the period of nearly 60 years in which he has been active.
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Ålesund is linked in a fascinating way to a central movement in 20th century art history. After the centre of the city was destroyed in a fire in 1904, it was swiftly rebuilt in such a way as to remain standing as a prominent example among European cities that are influenced by Art Nouveau. It was made possible by the work of young, recently educated architects. The city and its surroundings became an important subject for Fagermo, a subject that he has never completely relinquished. The organic line that characterises Art Nouveau is an element that is moreover echoed in Fagermo’s own style, with its emphasis on dynamic rhythm and decorative effects. Fagermo has also contributed to preserving and renewing the city of Ålesund, among other things in the form of wall decorations in which he plays on the floating arabesques of the Art Nouveau style.
Ålesund has not encapsulated itself in a nostalgic cultivation of period style. With each new generation there has been a flow of well-oriented artists and audiences who have represented a modernism that could have comprised a threat to what had been built up after the fire. When
Fagermo, as a young man, took up visual art there were ample opportunities to come in contact with the characteristic developments of the time. An encounter between local conditions and influences from without has led to artistic discourses and frictions that have contributed to forming a unique artistic profile.
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Fagermo’s exploration of abstraction is held in check by a desire to maintain a connection to real motifs. Form and colour are frequently derived from nature motifs which we can clearly perceive. Occasionally the artist provides a hint at what the pictures represent via the titles: “Park”, “Blue Winter”; “Red Tree” and “Spring Thaw” all point to impressions of nature as the point of departure for the abstraction. A close proximity to, and experience of, a concrete motif can be considered as an abiding source of almost everything that Fagermo has painted.
In the picture “Spatula” Fagermo refers to the utensil he has used to paint with. Via the title the artist reveals the significance of the utensil for the material effect and form in the picture. An uninhibited and bold use of tools and means, and a predilection for thickly applied paint, characterize many of Fagermo’s early abstract paintings. A thoroughgoing study of the craft and technique of painting can be seen as a motivating force. These are aspects of painting that are not inconsequential when it comes to the sensual experience that underlies the various surface effects in painting. To take the example of “Spatula”, for instance, there is a subtle reference to the spatula as a favoured utensil when scraping the last traces of a tasty batter or pudding from a bowl; a good painting can be compared to the sensual enjoyment one experiences when eating a good meal.
Fagermo began to work in an abstract idiom at a time when the style began to be more widely accepted by the Norwegian public. During the 1960s it became established as the leading art trend among the younger artists. As with Fagermo, we find in the majority of them a combination of what we can call a lyrical tradition in Norwegian landscape painting, which stems from the Romanticism of the 1800s, with elements of the Paris school of subdued and intellectually oriented painting style that had a predilection for a rich register of tones and harmonious compositions. They were influenced by artists such as Jean Bazaine (1904 – 2001), Sergé Poliakoff (1906 69) and Nicolas de Staël (1914 – 55). These artists were bought up by Norwegian collectors and museums and presented to a large public via exhibitions. Later one would also begin to see signs of a more radical influence from American painters. The painting style of the Cobra group and Abstract Expressionism were movements that distanced themselves from what, for many, was perceived as an anaemic French tradition that needed a shot of primitive originality in order not to wither away.
In his early paintings, Fagermo is at his best when he challenges the predilection among his peers to seek an idiom that emphasised harmony. Influences from a more spontaneous and daring painterly style appear early in his work.
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Fagermo’s vibrant abstractions were certainly worthy of recognition, but it was with a series of paintings he initiated during the 1970s, in a geometrical idiom, that he achieved his first success. These are pictures that sometimes resemble the building constructions of high technology, and at others, are raised into an infinite universe. Here the forms can be associated with space probes and futuristic cities in flight through the universe, or he composes large and small circular shapes in a way that resemble planets orbiting around each other.
Employing influences from artistic genres which were traditionally associated with commercial art, pop culture and advertising became – in the most progressive post-war art – an important source of renewal in the type of visual art that found its way to galleries and art museums. Fagermo had been influenced early on by modernism’s formal experimentation with geometrical shapes and expressive colours and he utilised these impulses among other things in the creation of posters. He is able to transform shapes in nature into stylised, flat, cubistic shapes and arrange them in a decorative composition on the picture plane. It is not inconceivable that Fagermo’s position at the periphery of the art establishment in Norway could have contributed to his fearless treatment of genres and cultural expressions, which the majority of Norwegian artists of his generation attempted to disassociate themselves from. His obvious skill in communicating through his art is a sign that he has benefited from his experience working with the kind of goal-oriented aesthetic communication that is typical of advertising and design.
A leaning towards a science-fiction vision of the world was a widespread phenomenon during the 1960s-70s. The attention that space travel and space technology enjoyed – which reached its zenith with the first landing on the moon in July 1969 – provided fodder for such interests. The development of technology transformed the idea that human beings could make the leap out into the universe from being fantasy, to being a feasible future reality. Fagermo’s pictures can inspire the imagination of the viewer when it comes to planetary excursions, space stations and unknown planets.
Increased integration into the international community and media technologies that brought events from every conceivable corner of the earth into the average person’s living room represented a challenge to the traditional conceptions of Norway. It was not only a country with endless miles of forests, virgin mountains and plains, glaciers and fjords; it was also a nation of oil platforms, dramatic interferences in nature and an accelerating industry based on high technology. The concentration of inhabitants in urban areas became more and more common. Interpretations of these phenomena as the dawn of a new and dynamic age of hope, and an imminent economic boom, were met with a dystopian vision of the future as a superficial state of uninhibited consumerism with a breakdown of traditional values and a destroyed nature as the legacy for future generations. We can sense both of these alternatives in Fagermo’s paintings from this period.
Fagermo did not work only with geometrical shapes which could be interpreted as a reality construed by engineers and scientists. He also worked with stylised organic shapes in which we can recognise references to the landscape formations of Western Norway, in an encounter between precisely drawn contours of hills and mountains and references to stylised seagulls in flight. These are pictures in which the shapes in nature are stylised to such an extent that nature is practically transformed into an estranged synthetic reality.
No one who experienced this transformation in person remained untouched by it, and Fagermo’s paintings are among the relatively few artistic testimonies from the period that were not ideologically based reactions in a realistic idiom – which was typical of the times – but which can be interpreted as characteristic visual symbols of the period. The paintings did not come into being in an artistic vacuum, however, and they have clear parallels to the contemporaneous works of two artists who reacted in a similar way to the developments of the times and who are considered among the most prominent figures in Norwegian art of the 20th century: Gunnar S. Gundersen (1921 – 83) and Arne Ekeland (1908 – 94).
Fagermo has transferred the geometrically constructed idiom to his three-dimensional works. “Sundolitt” (1922), which is located in Spjelkavik, was executed in steel for the Ålesund firm Brødrene Sunde. Two similar works were later produced for the firm’s factories in Germany and Sweden. In these sculptures he creates a dynamic interplay between globe and pipe shapes, which we recognise from his paintings with related shapes from the world of engineering. The use of polished, smooth surfaces intensifies a reading of the work as an unsentimental and straightforward tribute to modernity, devoid of nostalgia or backward glance at a romanticised past.
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During recent decades Fagermo has continued developing his painting based on the free abstract form that he cultivated in his early work, but now with a more forthright mooring in the Romanticist landscape tradition, in a dialogue with motifs that arise out of a perceived reality. In this context, Romanticism’s concept of nature is not opposed to creating a representational depiction of actual sites and motifs.
As early as the beginning of the 19th century, the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl was drawn towards a realistic perception of motif that took a critical stance towards the imagery developed at the height of German Romanticism, as exemplified by Caspar David Friedrich. Critical in the sense that it was a question of reworking and not merely taking over a previously existing idiom. An autonomous reworking of German, French and English Romanticist influences can be found in Dahl’s somewhat younger colleagues who were marked by their encounter with European Romanticism; Peder Balke and Thomas Fearnley. Based on this legacy from the 19th century, Norwegian painters have – in recent decades – treated the landscape art of Romanticism and created works in which the free abstraction and expressionism of the post-war period have imbued the tradition with new energy. It is within this revitalisation of a historical heritage that Fagermo’s landscape paintings of the last decades belong.
An interest in the traditions of art history has often resulted from contemporary movements that find their roots in previous artistic styles. This applies as well to the return of a form of Romanticist landscape painting that distinguished itself by breaking down strikingly realistic and naturalistic influences as we see in Fagermo. For Norwegians, the references to the dramatic nature and shifting climate one associates with Western Norway will appear as distinct motifs. Fagermo is not alone in this.
In Fagermo’s immediate surroundings we find traces of a similar type of painting in Kåre Haram (1911 – 92), who with his vibrantly coloured pictures of large abstract fields of paint, is akin to Fagermo, although he is more loosely connected to the motifs. Kåre Tveter (1922) and Ørnulf Opdahl (1944), who work in a more limited palette and imbue their landscapes with an almost mystical dimension, are more reserved in their style of painting. An important figure in 20th century Norwegian painting, which we can see traces of in several phases of Fagermo’s art production, is Olav Strømme (1909–78). Strømme, who was a pioneer of Surrealism during the 1930s in Norway, and subsequently of a progressively more abstract colour plane style of painting that manifested itself in large formats in which simple forms played against each other, was also a friend of the artist’s father. Fagermo’s sensitivity to scale, many of the material effects that we find in his work, as well as his compositional shapes are all features that resemble Strømme’s artwork.
This phenomenon is not so limited that it can be called a local Norwegian school. When this type of painting gained the popularity and scope that we see in Norwegian artists from the 1970s onwards, it can be related to the significance that the French painter Oliviere Debré had for some of them. Debré (1920 – 99) was one of the relatively few French artists who were strongly influenced by American painting, in particular in his use of an unrestricted palette and large planes of colour that spread over the canvas and are gathered into a distinct shape. Debré was popular among Norwegian collectors; he had several exhibitions in Norway and he also painted pictures that one can associate in particular to the dramatic natural formations that we associate with the fjord landscapes of Western Norway. It is a style of painting that can be seen as the European version of the colour-field painting that was developed by American painters, first and foremost in the paintings of Jules Olitski (1922 – 2007). As we can see, it is a phenomenon that stretches over several generations of painters. This can be explained by the fact that this style of painting is an offshoot of powerful movements in the cultural life of Europe and American during the 19th and 20th centuries, which is described by Robert Rosenblum in his important book, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko, from 1975.
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During the last 20 years Fagermo has alternated between keeping his painting style close to the impressions of nature that he builds on, and having a freer, more improvisational relationship to the motif. Many of the paintings can be considered realistic in their representation of the actual landscapes and he sometimes also includes realistically rendered details taken from the landscape or from buildings or vessels.
The desire to convey the impression a motif has made on him, the perception of a motif as shape, colour and material essence, gains a convincing formulation in the many panoramic views Fagermo has painted of the city of Ålesund seen from the mountain Aksla. The city unfolds beneath us and our gaze glides over the sea and stops at the mountain on the other side of the fjord. Fagermo’s use of colour is kept close to the local colours. Seen as a series based on a theme, they collectively give a convincing impression of the diversity that nature offers. The play of colour ranges from the poetically sensitive, in richly detailed depictions of shimmering silver tones on a rainy day, to a more earthly sky and sea, with deep blue in the mountain and a vivid play of grey and grey-blue in the cluster of buildings.
In addition, the paintings provide us with a strong impression of the scales of nature. This is achieved by delineating and harmonising the relationship between the various parts of the motif, something that is hardly visible in other visual mediums, which typically convey a mechanical representation of the motif. A sense of the scales in nature underlies the overwhelming dimensions and visual effects that characterise the nature of Western Norway, which Fagermo depicts so precisely.
A sense of scale is a constant element in the pictures where Fagermo juxtaposes realistically reproduced details that give us a hint at the dimensions of the buildings and the natural elements, with the massive natural shapes in a landscape. This allows us to experience how the landscape rises up from the water’s surface in unbroken shapes that manifest themselves in precipitous mountain cliffs and monumental peaks.
Fagermo occasionally works with horizontally shaped landscape formations in which the sky veritably flows onto the canvas as a uniform mass of colour. Sea and land are represented as stripes of roughly applied paint with a naturalistic depiction of buildings or a lighthouse. These details are the references by which we can measure the overwhelming dimensions in nature. In other pictures the relationship between sky and sea is reversed, and the sea devours the majority of the picture plane. For Fagermo, the sea is potentially full of colour and at his most daring it can just as likely be a screeching red, as blue, green or yellow. This freedom in relationship to the local colours spring out of the Nordic form of expressionism’s use of colour to denote emotion.
Fagermo has throughout the years tried out a number of composition types. The diagonal is an often-used type of composition that organises the refractions of light and shadow in a picture and underscores the drama of a motif. The artist uses a combination of composition types and distribution of dark and light areas to create an atmospheric effect that draws one into the pictorial space. Occasionally a strip of light shoots into the composition like a tear in the landscape, and then gradually disappears between two mountains.
One of the most effective and striking types of composition is the simple cross, which can be used both to create pictures where all of the elements are united in a harmonious whole, or to impart life and movement to the composition by juxtaposing the various parts that the cross divides the picture into – for instance via colour contrasts or alternating areas of light and shade. In contrast to the diagonally built composition are pictures in which the pictorial surface is divided into distinctive rectangular fields. The fields are then each given a different painterly treatment. The various compositional formulas which are all based on a division of the pictorial surface into explicit geometrical shapes, can be seen in the abstract painters Fagermo became acquainted with in his youth, but they are now primarily used as an underlying pattern that organise recognisable natural formations.
Throughout his many years as a painter Fagermo has perfected, developed and enriched his technique and operates today with a register that is manifested in the diversity of his production. The quality of the craftsmanship in his work is not cultivated for its own sake but is put to work in the interest of the idiom. Horizontal strokes in one area are contrasted with vertical strokes; a dash of impasto paint attracts the viewer’s gaze and directs attention to a specific area of the picture. Punctuations of the picture plane such as these cause the viewer’s gaze to pause and to linger.
One way to impart life to pictures is to apply the colours on top of each other in translucent layers, which creates atmospheric depth. The viewer’s gaze is thus drawn towards the surface of the picture plane in one moment, and seems to penetrate it in the next. If Fagermo ever had a fear of challenging the boundaries of the picture plane, he has put it aside long ago.
Fagermo’s paintings are full of tension and friction which gives them a dimension beyond being purely decorative displays of colour. Fagermo does not hesitate to press the colours to the brink of becoming overwhelming or shrill when he feels that it is needed in order to achieve the form of expression that he is seeking. At other times he has painted pictures that have the weightlessness of watercolours, where it almost feels as though the large fields of colour have been breathed onto the canvas.
In contrast to his early abstract works, in his more recent paintings Fagermo works consistently with a dominating colour tone in each picture. It provides a unifying tone to the whole, which he can then vary and juxtapose with elements of other tones or degrees of colour saturation, or he can introduce an overwhelming contrast in the form of a bold brushstroke or as a small shape that imparts life to the entire picture.
Fagermo’s work is characterised by an almost rapturous interaction with painting as a medium; a medium that allows him to rework and transcribe impressions from nature in such a way that the material itself and the handling of the paint become a voyage of discovery into aesthetic practice and adventure.
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