Andy Capp Variations
by Torbjørn Rødland (signed)
by Torbjørn Rødland (signed)
"Rødland employs the comic strip character of Andy Capp as the starting point for a series of black and white photographs. Repeating the same drawn image of this character, these photographs seem motivated by an interest in nivellation; an attempt at having the photographs neither appear as portrait, nor landscape, nor still life.
Torbjørn Rødland's recent body of works centres around a trademark portrait of this British comic strip character (whose strip has been running in daily newspapers since the late 1950s). Here the working class figure is rendered with his iconic pose: cap tipped down and cigarette dangling from his lips. Rødland located this drawing printed onto a souvenir mirror. The mirror was then applied to make a rhythmic reappearance of the same motif, but also to serve as a tool to tweak the logic of photographic flatness and pictorial space. Throughout these twelve photographs Rødland seeks to obscure the relationship between foreground and background, while never extending this play beyond the limits of analogue photographic techniques.
"Andy Capp Variations" could both be seen as a hard return to repetition and as an attempt to dissolve the classical genres that Rødland has been preoccupied with in recent years: the still life, the portrait and the landscape photography. These recent photographs apparently relish the arbitrary combination of elements from all the above genres. In isolating this pleasure from reason, Rødland would claim, these photographs are 'perverted': "Perverted photography doesn't sell a product or communicate a message. It's not meant to be decoded, but to keep you in the process of looking. It's layered and complex. It mirrors and triggers you without end and for no good reason, and that is erotic". Thus these photographs take an obvious interest in a limited play: the staccato insistence on the same image on the one hand and the continuous and restless re-contextualizing of the very same image on the other.
The choice of Andy Capp as the centre of this play could partly be explained by an interest in Andy Capp as a representation of the 'common man' or the comic strip as a representation of 'common sense'. Being about the people and for the people it does not rely on any education or esoteric knowledge."
7.75 x 9.55 in., saddle-stitched, 32 pages, soft cover, B/W offset
Edition of 500
Publication date: February 2011
Hassla Books
Torbjørn Rødland's recent body of works centres around a trademark portrait of this British comic strip character (whose strip has been running in daily newspapers since the late 1950s). Here the working class figure is rendered with his iconic pose: cap tipped down and cigarette dangling from his lips. Rødland located this drawing printed onto a souvenir mirror. The mirror was then applied to make a rhythmic reappearance of the same motif, but also to serve as a tool to tweak the logic of photographic flatness and pictorial space. Throughout these twelve photographs Rødland seeks to obscure the relationship between foreground and background, while never extending this play beyond the limits of analogue photographic techniques.
"Andy Capp Variations" could both be seen as a hard return to repetition and as an attempt to dissolve the classical genres that Rødland has been preoccupied with in recent years: the still life, the portrait and the landscape photography. These recent photographs apparently relish the arbitrary combination of elements from all the above genres. In isolating this pleasure from reason, Rødland would claim, these photographs are 'perverted': "Perverted photography doesn't sell a product or communicate a message. It's not meant to be decoded, but to keep you in the process of looking. It's layered and complex. It mirrors and triggers you without end and for no good reason, and that is erotic". Thus these photographs take an obvious interest in a limited play: the staccato insistence on the same image on the one hand and the continuous and restless re-contextualizing of the very same image on the other.
The choice of Andy Capp as the centre of this play could partly be explained by an interest in Andy Capp as a representation of the 'common man' or the comic strip as a representation of 'common sense'. Being about the people and for the people it does not rely on any education or esoteric knowledge."
7.75 x 9.55 in., saddle-stitched, 32 pages, soft cover, B/W offset
Edition of 500
Publication date: February 2011
Hassla Books
