Graduation show, Frank Mohr Institute

The factual state of being-transformed defines Eirik Jahnsen’s works—works generated by a collaboration with elemental forces. Natural phenomena and human nature hold similarities, belonging to a wholeness alike—one defined by cyclity and change. His art is an uncompromising act of transformation, wherein the directness of wild-forces affects all participating elements.

Jahnsen paints with water and fire and his works are direct and vibrant results of chemical reactions—an energetic battling in which nature and man confront one another with no goal for domination. What matters is bringing the hidden connection between elements to the open, so that it dissolves the just but apparent differences between Nature and Culture. In fact, another fundamental force that Jahnsen makes use of is time, in its processes of circulations and deterioration. This force is encountered in a potential enclosed within surroundings, in the energy that radiates from found objects—carriers of concrete traces left by the ongoing workings of time and nature. Time is both force and condition, an overarching structure in which the principles of creation, destruction and transformation can be articulated.

In Jahnsen’s work, the underlying tension between tangibility and immateriality—entailed by the use of such energies—becomes a question of encountering forces. One of a direct experience that the viewer has been invited to attend in order to perpetuate the process
of transformation: through the art experience, the potency of nature
is made manifest and so, shareable. Witnessing change implies becoming part of it, allowing the energy that created a form to thereby shape an experience of change. Many works literally embody this intentionality within their surfaces—often reflective—so that the viewer becomes sucked in by the artwork itself. Both the artistic process

and the works can be thought of as a playground-setting where transformative happenings take place.
With his work, Jahnsen suggests that mind and matter are not so dissimilar; both are subject to change, both are powerful means of a transformation pushing us into one when observed with the eyes of creation.

Text by  Elisabetta Cuccaro