Dance on the edge of a piece of paper

Dr Sophie Gerlach
A curtain in which a gentle draught plays, bringing out the delicateness of the fabric, a mild glow that embraces the entire scene, and then the metallic flash of a scalpel – welcome to the world of Edite Grinberga!

An incision … a strand of our thoughts snags on the scalpel, and the scalpel cuts it in two.

Edite Grinberga’s paintings have a sharpness that is all the more powerful in that they are robed in an apparent softness, and just at the moment when the observer’s thoughts begin to cavort with the subject matter, comes the realization that it’s not quite so simple as it appears – a blueprint of life is uncovered.

In these painted moments, which confer a form of eternity on the ephemeral, the artist cryptically goes beyond the ostensible, packing in references to invisible elements and meanings.

It’s not about painting as such, but about holding fast a momentary emotion that implicitly shapes a lifetime. How can one bring that emotion back, with all its complexity – conflict-laden, and with the melancholy beauty of transience and impending loss? By virtue of an equally complex mastery of the medium that serves the fixation of momentary emotion in visual form. Thus the apparently ephemeral is actually minutely planned, stage-managed, and implemented with brush and paint on canvas.

In the same measure as Edite Grinberga ceaselessly challenges herself to go further than before, to paint more precisely, to capture the transient moment more hauntingly and strikingly, she also challenges the observer and their emotions. Subtly and sometimes ironically she exposes the arcane in herself and in the observer, from which there is henceforth no more withdrawing. Latent oscillations are turned to audible sounds by pictured moments. Circumspection is warranted, because one can easily lose oneself in the lightness of the painted materials and in a reverberation of past passion, only to find oneself staring the despondency of abandonment in the face, a glacial countenance that one has had to greet more than once in real life. The scalpel represents the end of an illusion, the passport the gradual ending of a time of travel that will never return. The punching bag is witness to a wild anger that has evaporated, leaving only a weariness behind that already harbours a new beginning.

The fascinating technique that the painter continuously strives to perfect – the observer is at pains to detect any brushstrokes at all on the canvas – affords this tightrope-walk between dream and reality, creates the connection to our inner selves. For we also mostly dream in images, and the emotions these dream-images evoke are from time to time even hyperreal, but Edite Grinberga’s paintings themselves are neither hypereal, nor are they intended to be. Instead they are about the balancing act of recognizing and bonding eternities into fleeting sceneries, and vice versa.

Natural light is always Edite Grinberga’s handmaiden in achieving these artistic effects. She captures it in sometimes endless sessions, in order to represent it later on canvas in a more intense way, thus blending it with her artistic world. The translucency of her pictures is such that even walls appear to breathe.

In these apparently cool ensembles of objects and locations, movement and life are nevertheless always implied. The absence of people in the images underlines their past presence and actions, and their effect on others – in other words, our inner lives, whose essence is here distilled and reified.

And thus these paintings achieve their impact by resembling freeze-frames from the dance of life, which now and then, in its most beautiful moments, takes place on the sharp edge of a piece of paper.

Go back