Exhibition Title Recommendations:

Composing Reflections / Beneath The Surface (borrowed from one of the artist’s works) / Romancing The Imagination

Translating personal reflections on the physical world into poignant compositions bursting with colors and textures, Elling Reitan beautifully blends visual aesthetics with spirituality.

Often referred to as “the artist with the beautiful colors”, Reitan began his artistic career with a juried exhibition in Trondhjem’s Kunstforening (Art Society) in Norway in 1979. Today, having developed a unique visual language, he has showcased his works in more than a hundred and fifty solo and group exhibitions across the globe. His work is part of a number of public and private collections in Norway, the United State of America, as well as in Europe and Asia.

Reitan is a skillful and expressive artist showcasing mastery of technique in a number of different mediums and styles — romantic oil compositions with an idiosyncratic touch of texture, intricate silkscreened masterpieces brought to life with his vibrant color palette and imaginative landscapes that poetically embrace abstraction. His works, encompassing several layers of contextual interpretations within them, have equally as much to offer to the audiences. “The aim of my paintings is to say something about the world we are living in,” he says. “However, there are no fixed meanings. I like people to search for themselves and see what they can find. Most of my artworks can be interpreted in many different ways”.

The versatility in Reitan’s works is conceptually tied together with a recurring allusion to the Chinese concept of “yin and yang” or “the two black and white drops of water that together form a perfect circle,” as the artist describes it. Symbolically represented by a set of black and white figures tastefully woven into each of the compositions – sometimes delicately peeking through the chaos of energetic abstraction and other times assertively claiming the viewers’ gaze in the distant horizon – the gesture acts as a personal signature inducing additional contextual as well as visual depth to his paintings. “They are counterparts — black and white, male and female, warm and cold — that together form a unity,” explains the artist.

Reitan’s contemplative works of art, with their bold, inviting visual language and inherent layers of reflective dialogue, compel the audience to temporarily cease the constant chaos in and around them, and embark on an introspective journey through their own imaginations. “There is a stream of inputs, both visual and emotional, hitting us every second, and a lot of it we involuntarily accept, simply because we do not have time to reflect over it,” says the artist, “With my art, that can often be interpreted in several different ways, I want to provide the viewers with the opportunity of discovery and reflection”.

Tanya Singh.