About Me
New Pictures
Johannes Høie is a gifted and knowledgeable drawer. He can therefore splurge with drawings in different genres, and create meaningful pictures.
Høie is well known with the formal conditions for those things that other drawers is struggling with; spatial perception. When we look at his pictures, we migth mistake them for beeing representations of "reality". But the drawings are Høies fantasies, images of people and identeties that does not exist outside of Høies head. We are in other words talking about staging, something that in contemporary art usually is treated in performance and photography.
But Høies pictures aren't "portraits" of "real" people, but his own stories, free hand drawn fictions where drawing skills and knowledge is the starting point for creating new pictures. In contrast to for example baroque's Rembrandt, that drew a "snapshot" of a child learnig to walk, hasn't Høies pictures occured by medial dependency, in the abcence of photography. Høie could for example photograph and make photocollages, but has chosen drawing as his primary media. This media, that in centuries were preferred as a basis for sketching, demands a certain physichal mastership if it is to be used for represent objects in a space. In those kinds of drawings the proportions and especially the shifthing of lines and angles are the essential tools for creating visual, comprehensive relations between what in the traditional photography is laying on the surface, defined by ligth.
It's with the new, digitalized photograph that artists like Høie can redifine drawing as a media; the synthetic photograph, that does not have it's origin in ligthdepiction of an organic reality, but a digital accommodated photo, is familiar for everyone born into the new imageculture. Imageposters on TV, icons at internetsites, and "photorealistic" interactive-games on the internet are all photo-related, but seldom claim to be depictions of a physical reality; they are on the other hand new-pictures. The picture shows it self as a meaning, as a message.
Høies walldrawings that we at first glance might mistake for large scale projected graphic prints, are in facts Høies own drawings. And not re-makes of historic pictures. He uses historic drawing genres, and incorporates drawing-techniques from pre-modern graphic-traditions into a drawing-practice that redefines our perception of the images around us, and that exists in us.
Høie's drawingskills, that has been developed in a totally different society that when Rembrandt had to learn to describe objects and people through drawing, are "unpure" in the notion that they haven't occured through describe for example weigth and scale, but the fact that he uses genres that occured through a meeting with such erlier, daily challenges for an artist.
What migth look like a plausible portrait of a person, is really not an existing person. Who are we looking at, and what expresses this person? This is Høie's contribution to our common image-culture.
-ANDERS EIEBAKKE
Artist,writer and curator.
www.johanneshoie.com
