Interview: Rannvá Kunoy

Rannvá Kunoy: Summarframsýningin 2010 (installation view), 2010.

Would you like to start by explaining shortly the basic ideas encompassed by your works in the exhibition? 

I guess that is an "easy" question, yet a very difficult one to answer. The work deliberately occupies an uneasy and very particular space between abstraction and figuration. Everyone knows how the human eye searches for its home and figure in everything it sees, and through the medium of paint, I try to push this law to its ultimate and absurd consequences. The show at NLH is a travelling show that started at Diana Stigter, Amsterdam, a solo show I did in March 2010. Three previous and two recent works were also added. The show does not have a theme or title, my shows never do. It is about the works and their influence on each other.

Why painting? Something post-YBA or?

To question “why paint” seems to me a strange concept and always has. Painting is a knowledge that exists and to question why we use that knowledge seems rather futile. A quote from Lee Lozano comes to mind, "Cave paintings exist because the caves were used as toilets". It sort of takes the big mystery out of the mark and turns it jokingly into a necessity.

I find the work titles interesting, how do they correspond to the works? I.e. is it a direct link/reference to the work or should they be considered as guides or what?  

I believe a work should always be able to stand in its own right with or without a title, yet once a work has been titled it always infects the reading or experience of a work, and I really like that. Titles are negotiations of what could or could not be. For instance the title Hit has so many connotations and meanings, from violence to a pop song. This word opens up so many possibilities from sad to joyous, and that then influences the direction of how to think about the work.

Other titles are stronger and more provocative, such as If You Work In Marketing Or Advertising Kill Yourself, which was taken from the comedian Bill Hicks. This sort of title is teasingly using humour as a way of "getting under the skin" of emotionally and socially difficult subject matters. It jokingly implies a message to which you have to take a stance in relationship to a painting that plays with spontaneous, automatic, gesture or expression.

Rannvá Kunoy: Damage, 2009. 159 x 120 cm. Acrylic on canvas.

Do you give titles after you have finished a painting, or do you use them in the working process as guides for yourself, so the title or whatever it could be becomes a medium of negotiation between you and the painting?

The titles do not take part in the negotiations of the work. They are a way to trigger fantasy or to puzzle the viewer, yet never in a random way. The paintings have elements of the planned and unforeseen, and I also title accordingly, sometimes before a work is begun and at other times after completion.

Would it then be possible to not give any titles, I mean, of course it would be possible, but you have chosen to give titles to the NLH show, is there a kind of “rather title than not”? 

My titles can be a reaction to the questions the work is triggering, whether or not I will always want to ask or answer those questions I cannot say, as that would be reflecting too much meaning on the titles.

Before you talked about a “law”. How painting becomes a necessity at the same time as it not longer is a mystery. The German artist Hans Peter Feldman talks about how art no longer is a problem, because the garden (art) that once was surrounded by a fence suddenly no longer is surrounded by the fence. Therefore art is everywhere (or nowhere) and no longer is a particular problem. Is this what you are talking about?

Whether or not there is a fence one still has to be in the garden and state where you are and what you can add or take from that garden. Painting is what is there and what there is not and then the space between them. In order to use the endless possibilities one has to know what to take.

Rannvá Kunoy: Waitress Daisy Chain, 2009. 159 x 120 cm. Acrylic on canvas.		Rannvá Kunoy: Hit, 2010. 159 x 120 cm. Acrylic on canvas.

Rannvá Kunoy: Belle of the Ball, 2009. 69 x 57 cm. Acrylic on canvas.		Rannvá Kunoy: Ripe, 2010. 69 x 57 cm. Acrylic on canvas.

Would you like to explain a bit more about the abstraction challenging figuration and vice versa?

I deliberately aim for the work to not belong to any order of things. Whether it is abstract or figurative it is all the same. It is the point of view that matters more.

What “point of view”? 

What you are saying through the surface, format and colour; this is how the subject or point of view comes across.

How is it about the appropriation in your paintings? I mean the use of e.g. text. Perhaps this is also relevant for the talk about titles and the abstraction and figuration?

Appropriation has of-course expanded. It no longer only attests towards a particular stance of contemporary culture, and in this expansion my aim has been to use it to suit my particular world of painting. I was very taken by the critical distance appropriation allowed, it has an almost romantic sense of transformation and it allowed me the detachment I needed from the composition in order to flirt and tease with the established criteria of figuration and abstraction.

Do you think this sometimes could be considered as a kind of readymade within the painting? 

Readymade is maybe too strong and definite a term. It could be seen as a space for analysing, taking the familiar and transforming it into something, and thus it becoming something else.

Thank you.

Rannvá Kunoy: FRONTAL, 2008. 104 x 81 cm. Lithograph, series of 7. Rannvá Kunoy: FRONTAL, 2008. 104 x 81 cm. Lithograph, series of 7. Rannvá Kunoy: FRONTAL, 2008. 104 x 81 cm. Lithograph, series of 7.