In a Mirror, Clearly
by Mathias Danbolt
The art museum, the gallery, the church. As the child of two Catholic art historians in Bergen, I grew up feeling just as much at home in these spaces as in my own family house. This makes it feel almost personal—and therefore unsettling—to enter Per Barclay’s exhibition at OSL contemporary and encounter his photographs of such familiar, reassuring spaces now flooded with black oil and white milk. Even the idea of home as a place of stability seems to dissolve in his intimate sculptures of houses where walls, floors, and ceilings shift restlessly, and nothing is in balance.
The disturbance deepens when I recognize the sites Barclay has intervened in, and the artworks reflected in the dark and light liquids: Cimabue's crucifix from around 1270, mirrored in an oil-filled Chiesa de San Domenico in Arezzo; Guido Reni’s Massacre of the Innocents (1611), reflected in the oil-covered floor of the Pinacoteca di Bologna; Christian Krohg’s The Struggle for Existence (1889) and Edvard Munch’s monumental The Woman in Three Stages (1894), mirrored in the oil flooding the Rasmus Meyer Collection at KODE in Bergen. In contrast to these motifs of existential struggle stand Aase Texmon Rygh’s models for Spiral I (1951) and Pirouette (1951), originally created for the international competition The Unknown Political Prisoner in London. In Barclay’s photograph, the sculptures’ abstract gestures of freedom are reflected in a sea of white milk covering the floor of OSL contemporary’s own rooms.
Yet it is not only the flooded rooms and the canonized works they contain that make Barclay’s practice so unsettling. Even when staged in such symbol-laden contexts, his works remain open to multiple readings. In trying to articulate what I believe is at stake in these reflections, I inevitably expose something of my own gaze—and of what I bring with me into the encounter.
When I was asked to write about Barclay’s exhibition, I hesitated, uncertain whether I was the right person—especially in a time like this. Although I have long had a relationship with Barclay’s practice, first introduced to me by my father in childhood, I have struggled to find a language for my attraction to his works. Perhaps this is because I have never felt at ease in the somewhat lofty and abstract philosophical discourse that has shaped parts of the reception, where his work is often described as reaching toward a “metaphysical horizon”.[1] Nor have I been persuaded by my father Gunnar Danbolt’s Arte Povera-inspired analysis in Norsk kunsthistorie (2001), which portrays Barclay as an artist who fills “completely contentless materials, for example oil and asphalt [...] with aesthetic perspectives—including in a modernist sense”.[2] To me, the artworks Barclay mirrors and the materials in which they are reflected seem saturated with meaning—a density that resists reduction to either metaphysics or purely formal qualities.
Art critic Arve Rød is surely right that Barclay is not known for articulating an “overtly eco-political” agenda or for pursuing institutional critique.[3] Yet I find it difficult to view oil as a merely aesthetic material. Perhaps it is also the time in which I encounter these works that presses in on me: the war in Ukraine, the daily reports of genocide in Gaza, the ongoing devastations of the climate crisis. Abstraction feels impossible. My reflections remain anchored in the tangible presence of the materials themselves: the dark, viscous, toxic mass of motor oil, and the milk from industrialized agriculture, spilled across the floor.
At the same time, the exhibition’s focus on religious spaces and iconography makes it impossible to entirely escape the sacred and solemn register. Guido Reni’s painting of the scene from the Gospel of Matthew, where Herod orders the killing of all infant boys in Bethlehem and its surroundings in an attempt to eradicate the Christ as a child, offers one of art history’s most psychologically charged depictions of patriarchal power and mothers’ desperate—and futile—attempts to protect their children from soldiers’ weapons. The women’s muted screams and the heap of dead children in the painting’s lower corner, doubled in the dark oil mirror, are heartbreaking. The two small angels above, carrying palm branches as signs of the infants’ sainthood, do nothing to ease the horror; they appear instead almost provocative; suggesting that sacrifice must be accepted for a greater cause.
It has been long since I got too queer to fit into the Catholic Church, but I have not forgotten the biblical lessons of my childhood. Standing before Barclay’s dark reflections, I recall a much-quoted passage from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians:
For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.[4]
Traditionally, the verse has been read as consolation: we do not see clearly now, but one day—after Christ’s resurrection—everything will be revealed, and love will prevail. Yet it can also read as a legitimization of ignorance, as if it were natural, even desirable, not to understand what we see. To look “in a mirror, darkly” can too easily become an excuse to avoid acknowledging the world’s violence and cruelty—and our own complicity—in the belief that love will eventually triumph.
In Barclay’s installations, the mirror becomes a medium that unsettles this division between present opacity and future clarity. When images of suffering are reflected in pools of black oil, past and present touch, and I cannot ignore the political and ecological meanings of the material: fossil capital, war, extraction, environmental destruction. The mirror does not point to faith and hope in a distant future, but establishes a space of reflection here and now for grasping how history shapes our contemporary conditions.
Yet Barclay’s works are not only dark. In the photograph from OSL contemporary, Aase Texmon Rygh’s Spiral I and Pirouette are reflected in white milk. Here it is not death and destruction that dominate, but movement and a longing for freedom materialized in sculptural form. Whereas oil drags with it the heavy sediments of history, milk carries associations of life and nourishment—even as it, too, points to the problematic structures of industrial production.
It is not easy to find firm ground in Barclay’s works. Like the small sculptures of houses caught in states of dissolution or becoming, I am left unsettled. The aestheticization in Barclay’s works does not function as a veil but a reminder that even the most beautiful surfaces rest upon a dirty, untenable foundation. His mirrors do not invite us into ponder dark riddles that postpones recognition but confront us with a challenge: to reckon with our own partial perspectives, our incomplete understandings, and our responsibility for the present we inhabit.
[1] Ses for instance Agata Polizzi, ”Like Leaves around the Axis of Life”, Per Barclay: Soft Sweet Vortex, ed. Ana Maria Bresciani, Oslo: Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and Kontur Forlag, 2023, p. 56.
[2] Gunnar Danbolt, Norsk kunsthistorie. Bilde og skulptur frå vikingtida til i dag. 2. ed, Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 2001, p. 451.
[3] Arve Rød, ”Black Mirror in Oil’s Dystopic Shadow, Per Barclay: Soft Sweet Vortex, ed. Ana Maria Bresciani, Oslo: Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and Kontur Forlag, 2023, p. 40.
[4] 1 Corinthians 13: 12-13, New Revised Standard Version. |
