Selected reviews for "Witness-The Art of Reinhardt Søbye", a huge retrospective organized by Asahi Shimbun, Odakyo Art Museum (Tokyo), Shimonoseki City Art Musem, Kariya City Art Museum. All works selected by Mr. Shigeo Chiba, curator at the Japan National Museum of Modern Art.
The exhibition was a major sucsess; 50.000 visitors, three reprints of the exhibition catalogue and high remarks in japanese newspapers and artjournals.
Human Karma in the Silent Gaze
The work of this 43 year-old contemporary Norwegian painter was first shown to the Japanese public five years ago, and his paintings have been displayed here on six occasions, quietly deepening the impression they left on each occasion. Now this, the seventh one-man showing, is in a sense a summing-up of what has gone before.
Confronted once more with those faces, the viewer is himself plunged into a profound silence; the only thing he can do is, little by little, grope for the words to express the experience.
The pictures are all of aged people, sick people, minorities, army deserters and the likein short, the tormented. Sobye paints their faces, with a thoroughgoing realism, as motifs of defeat in the present age.
In the background behind the faces there doubtless lie, contemporary scenes of war, persecution, cultural decadence. But Sobye does not explain: he simply portrays the vacant eyes, the light smile playing around the lips, the deep cleft between the eyebrows, the worn skin - with a sure, unflinching brush.
As one looks, the faces come to seem like complex landscapes of hills, or desolate plains. They rise up and merge before one's eyes into one vast scene comprising the whole variety of human feelings when confronted with fate - solitude, anxiety, fear, hope....
What we are seeing here is neither the accusations of the socially committed, nor the work of a skilled contemporary realist. We see, rather, an infinite universality transcending matters of technique and style: what one can only call the unfathomable loneliness of his subjects, of humanity itself.
Take, for example, the old woman in Solitude III, observed with an almost clinical lifelikeness. From the depths of her silence, one no longer has anything; there is only emptiness, a void. In the depth of the wrinkles carved on her face, one sees the profundity of the karma governing human beings' life. Yes - in the Buddhist term familiar to us, the faces that Sobye shows us are the shapes of human karma. Rooted in his fundamental critique of the discrimination, deceit and arrogance that pass under the name of civilization, his realism ends by portraying the unreasonability of existence as such, transcending logical ideas of cause and effect.
The development of this century's art has been a process of consuming and discarding one novel style after another. Just what, though, has it succeeded in embodying?
That is
the question that Sobye's vision confronts us with in its exploration of the depths of humanity.
The images of the exhibition as a whole constitute, in a sense, a modern Book of Revelation. Yet one emerges with an odd sense of refreshment; a deep emotion that is separate from and larger than any "message" in the pictures gradually arises and fills one's being. A process of "purification," perhaps?
At the age of 23, Sobye gave up the study of pscychology and took to painting, which he studied through personal observation, without a teacher.
Nihon Keizai Shimbun, June 23, morning edition
Born in Oslo in 1956, the artist has held annual one-man exhibitions in Japan for the pas t five years. The present exhibition is a retrospective placing on show 57 works painted between 1992 and last year. The gloomy, unsettling images may recall the painter's compatriot Munch, but lack the burning sense of life peculiar to the latter. The gaze that Sobje turns on humanity is dryly dispassionate.
The faces are oddly distorted, the wrinkles especially emphasized. Their gaze is either vacant or over-keen. The works on which the artist has stuck pieces of real old clothes have an odd sense of reality to life, so that one almost suspects them of being malicious. However, this negative impression is counterbalanced by the artist's empathy with his subjects that one glimpses from time to time; what is strange is that even the most disturbing of the portraits has a kind of dignity.
Most of the works, apparently, depict society's underprivileged. The picture of clothing wom by inmates of the concentration camps, and landscapes such as "From the forsaken country I and ir' and "The desolate farm" will give a good idea of where the artist's interests lie. Painstakingly, he paints such themes, with their overridingly tragic overtones, with an outstanding realistic skill.
Unrestricted by ideas of art for art's sake, the artist tackles his down-to-earth motifs head-on. It is an approach that Japanese artists, even today, when more than a century has passed since they first began to learn from Western art, have yet to master.
The exhibition continues until the 27th at the Odakyu Art Museum in Tokyo, then travels to the Shimonoseki Art Museum and the Kariya Municipal Art Museum.
Tokyo Shimbun, June evening edition
The artist portrays the distortions of society and the misery of human beings, not via actions or incidents, but through faces alone. Most of the 57 works on show are portraits of this nature. Deep wrinkles, almost like trenches dug in the skin, are shown in graphic detail; every single hair, on the beard or the head, is depicted with startling reality. Pieces of real old clothes are sometimes used in collage, but mostly the artist's vivid realism is confined to faces, the other parts of the picture being done with simple, abbreviated brushwork - a contrast that focusses the viewer's attention on the face and in particular on the eloquently gleaming eyes.
Despite the anguished expressions of the faces all around, the exhibition venue is strangely free, from any enveloping atmosphere of oppression.
A piece of acryl set in the frame becomes a part of the work, deliberately scratched to make it opaque, then vigorously daubed with red, green and other Colors. The acrylcovered picture in the frame, suggesting as it does the feeling of looking out from within a telephone box, gives the viewer a feeling of distance, as though it were cut off from himself.
Sobye's work as a whole, in fact, conveys a strong impression of pictures sealed off within acryl. The life of utter desperation of those tormented by society or government, the life of extreme solitude, the life of unlimited wretchedness, are crystallized in the space within the frame, which is transformed into a place which, while transcending the
individual experience, is still backed up by a sense of the living flesh. Though one will look in vain for the joy of life, a more solemn, ponderous type of life here exudes an atmosphere of an almost suffocating density.
Sobye is an artist who portrays the souls of the tormented. Still more, though, the essence of his art lies in crystallizing the essential value and purity of life in such a way as to brush aside considerations of abstract "messages." He is a type of artist that one does not find in Japan.
(Mainichi Shimbun, June 21, evening edition)
Of cours human faces and full-length portraits are far from unknown even today; if anything, the new attention being paid nowadays to themes of the body and the flesh have prompted a new look at the human figure as a theme for art. However, what makes Sobye's treatment unique is that he neither uncritically follows the academic approach tied to tradition nor associates himself the with-subjective deformations indulged in by the school of modern artists represented by Francis Bacon.
The painterly skills honed, without a teacher, by the artist himself, who was originally a psychology student, are sufficiently outstanding to have won him a prize in his own country. In his case, however, the scrupulous attention to realistic detail is no more than a foundation on which the expression rests. The important thing, rather, is the unparalleled power to reach out to the viewer possessed by what he constructs on that foundation. The subjects he portrays are mostly nameless sufferers under some form of misfortune or injustice, adults and children, together with self-portraits that carry an extra, hidden significance but it would not do on this account to jump to the conclusion that Sobye is a mere champion of minorities.
His preoccupation with such subjects, surely, is due to a conviction that it is precisely in the faces of people, such as these that one can detect in natural, straightforward form the dignity of being a human being unrestricted by civilization and systems. In that sense, one might almost call him an heir to the Gaugin who, on the threshold of the modern age, sought to answer the question "what are we?" His gaze penetrates deep into his subjects, and he applies crayon, pastel or water colour with painstaking detail to surfaces almost devoid of background in order to summon U ' images of feeling flesh. and blood. He applies delicate shading to the faces, and in so doing gives the impression of reflecting the finest fluctuations of the heart.
The current exhibition, which presents for the first time an overall retrospect of Sobye's art from early days to the present, serves to convey these special qualities of his art to the full. The display also includes works in which similar themes are embodied in richly nuanced landscapes, pictures of concentration camp clothing and the like, together with portraits of the Professor Hariu who first introduced his work in Japan.
The artist was born in 1956.
An Unvarnished View of the Raw Realities of the Age The Reinhardt Sobye Exhibition
The mainstreams of painting today lie in the abstract, the fanciful and the expressionistic. Sobye, on the other hand, sticks firmly to traditional realism, The contemporary art world, moreover, is interested primarily in embodying concepts that nobody ever thought of embodying before, whereas almost all Sobye's work falls within the field of portrait painting, which has has been around for centuries already.
And yet, in spite of this - or perhaps, precisely because of it - Reinhardt Sobye, I feel, is an artist who both represents the present and is likely to survive into the future.
The models for his portraits are either totally - or, from a global viewpoint, almost totally - unknown people. Exactly because of this, though, they affect us, almost, with the sense of familiarity of close acquaintances, as symbols of the varied humanity that we see about us in our daily lives. Among his favorite subjects, moreover, are those who find themselves alienated or tormented within society - the "Solitude," series, for example, treats a the universal theme of old age. On the other hand, with "The Serb Deserter" ('69"), the refuse girl in "Angel from Iraq" ('98) and "The Child Prostitute" ('96), he is already dealing with the great problems of our day; in this respect, he could be called, paradoxically, a more "contemporary" artist than anyone else. Not one of the human beings he has chosen to paint are treated in a theoretical, abstract way. Rather, with the greatest technical brilliance, he records in fine, detail every hair, every wrinkle (the lines of the clothing, on the other hand, are barely hinted at - which in fact actually serves to heighten the effect), What rescues the whole from simple realistic observation, though, is the treatment of the eyes and the mouth, where the
psychological state of each subject is treated with almost terrifying accuracy. How many among us can stare back unperturbed into the eyes of the girl -in "HIV-positive girl from Kiev" ('96), with their look that is neither anger nor resignation, neither fear nor unawareness, but simply an utterly limpid gaze?
One of the unique techniques with which Sobye enhances this effect is a kind of collage whereby he affixes pieces of actual old clothes or sheets to his canvas. In "The dead child" ('93) and - though they are not much represented in the current exhibition - the group of works on the theme of the Nazi concentration camps, this technique achieves a raw sense of reality.
His second unique technique involves fitting a transparent sheet, dribbled here and there with paint, in front of the picture. The effect is to a certain extent to obscure the subject itself, but at the same time serves to make one feel, conversely, that these people are calling to us not to forget them from beyond the mists of time.
Sobye was not, in fact, an artist from the start. Born in Oslo in '56, he studied psychology at Bergen University, but suddenly, shortly before his finals, switched to the study of painting, without a teacher, and eventually, with his "Face, of Christ" ('87), in which he used part of a sweater with a traditional Norwegian pattern as collage, achieved recognition. Since war is a common theme in his paintings, I asked him if he had lost family or friends in the fighting. This is what he replied: "No, I didn't. I myself have no experience of war. I just feel a strong duty to let people know about contemporary questions such as the cruelty of war, -racial discrimination and neglect of others' humanity..."
One feels that the Japanese art world today could do with more of this attitude, As Sobye has also said: "Just as they used to take a canary down into the mines to detect a lack of oxygen, I would like to be an artist who gives the world warning of the crisis it is facing."