OSL contemporary is pleased to announce The Balance of Painters, an exhibition featuring new works by Dag Erik Elgin. The show includes 50 paintings of 40 x 30 cm format, executed in oil on canvas. Each picture displays 4 numerals arranged in vertical rows, painted using stencils, on a ground of pastels and greys.

The Balance of Painters is a continuation of Elgin’s longstanding investigations into the history and physical characteristics of painting in light of art-historical ideals and contemporary visual culture. This entails an interest for the fundamental issues of medium, such as figure versus ground, surface and stroke, as well as for aesthetic economies and reception history. Parallel with The Balance of Painters, Henie Onstad Art Center presents the project Modernism Machine, where Elgin’s investigations unfold in a larger format.

The numerical subjects of The Balance of Painters represents Roger de Piles’ assessments of the most important painters of his time, as published in his book, Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres, of 1708. Roger de Piles (1635-1709) was a painter, art critic and diplomat, responsible for acquisitions for the art collection of King Louis XIV, and an active debater in the discourse on “modern” versus “classic” qualities of painting. In Cours de peinture, de Piles conceives a quantitative system for evaluating artistic achievement, based on a scale from 0 to 18, and divided into the categories ”composition”, ”drawing”, ”colour” and ”expression”. From the original list of 57 artists evaluated by de Piles, we are today aware of de Piles ranking of 50 painters from the Renaissance and Baroque periods- from Raphael and Michelangelo to Rembrandt and Rubens

The picture series, The Balance of Painters is a painted version of de Piles’ overview. The actual selection of works is of lesser interest to Elgin, than the ambition of this material to rationalize artistic quality. De Piles’ system identifies painting as a stable and measurable occurrence, and his numerical analysis intended to disclose something both precise and generalized about artistic achievement. The Balance of Painters engages with a connection between this schematic art criticism, and the modern artistic movements of minimalism and conceptual art. The representative image is replaced by a reduced economy of the sign, and an archival aesthetic. People, events and traditional painterly qualities are exchanged for a ”neutral” representation of these same characteristics: composition/figure, ground, colour, stroke, etc., - as such Elgin’s painted numbers entails a play with the concept of figure in painting, - as in the English language, ”figure” can mean both subject and number.