SCOTOPIC SADDLE

'SCOTOPIC SADDLE' is an evocative semi-abstraction in nocturnal colours by an artist renowned in Europe for works which filter pop-inflected imagery through tides and accumulations of thick paint. Fascinated by analogues between music and painting, Ekblad uses pigment, texture and viscosity as a kind of ‘noise’ that alters and distorts legible scenes, signs and images, insisting on painting’s capacity – in a culture of efficient communications – to provide ambiguity, feedback and pleasurable ‘interference’. 'SCOTOPIC SADDLE' also marks a turn in her work from more obviously pop imagery to colours and spaces evocative of landscape. The sonorous purples and greens of the work feel ‘northern’: those colours figured strongly in early modern European expressionism. Ekblad refers to these as ‘nocturnal paintings’ and, in a text whose leaps of logic and shifts of perspective echo those in the painting itself, elaborates:

"I have thought that the twilight sometimes feels longer than the totality of the day. That during dusk the movement from sunlight to blue and from blue to blackness holds the colours hostage. Transitional light clouds the hues and dims them. Calms them. Colours are greyed and put to sleep. But what if the grey area is the greatest area? What if the night zone has another source of light. What if the colours are illuminated by unrest and the dark glow of insomnia. Like a shine through a tinted film. A day-for-night movie effect. The cadmium red on a poppy has turned blue but is still red. White sheets are purple and still white. The eyes are calibrating. The brain is upside down. You are surrounded by yourself. And what if the night world is not where you run in syrup and trip, where you fail and fail, fall and fall and sink and sink. It’s not where you are knocked unconscious, but rather where you are given blind control. Where you have mesopic vision. Where you have twilight vision and you see unseen pigments and double horizons." 1

The title of the painting affirms this interest in dusk and night-time as periods when forms lose their specificity and begin to shift shape. ‘Scotopic’ refers to vision in dim light, when the retinal rods are activated. As for the ‘saddle’, perhaps it is the magenta form that rises in the centre of the painting – a form that also recalls the monumental painted sculptures that Ekblad has recently realised in landscape settings. Or perhaps the painting itself is the saddle – a form designed to hold the eye as it rides through palpable colour.

1. 'Ida Ekblad: SCOTOPIC SADDLE', Peder Lund, Oslo 2022