On Black & Clair-Obscur

Contemplations from Harald Lyche's exhibition Poetry of Painting featuring the poetry collection Clair-Obscur (Forlaget Oktober, 2016) next to the drawings that inspired them: the sketchbook Black.

When Tommy Olsson, critic and author, opened the exhibition, he said: "Maybe we’re all birds." I think of birds, their footprints over the sheet and the snow, and their beaks like a brush or pen, and also of how Harald Lyche has removed the horizon from his paintings. Everything drifts. Where would they land? The same goes for the poems. They were written inspired by the drawings in Black. In this sketchbook, Lyche describes how reality slips away, how the signs of reality become meaningless. I thought of how the beauty of these drawings will never again be understood, and tried, anthropologically, to decipher this "Mycenaean script" which, via syllabic signs, expresses a single reality.

The sketchbook is by Daler-Rowney, and on the front is written, or painted, in gold (the signature appears to be in italics): 

Harald Lyche
BLACK
Drawings
from
Paris

Lyche attacked his own studio at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris. In one of the drawings the phrase "Hunting Scene" is written, in the poem "Name, date, place" a person says with a shrug: I have taken life. Lyche ended up at Charenton, the same madhouse where the Marquis de Sade was. He stayed there for several months. Maybe we are all signs. Streaks at best. Circles more rarely. The drawings, about sixty, inspired as many poems. There, the horizon has also been removed, in the sense that it is unknown who is speaking. The "I" has neither gender, race, religion or sexual orientation. There is no confessional self. I don't think there is a higher self in the drawings either. Although all the lines bear Lyche's signature. A sensible person might think: These drawings should be read carefully.

CHARENTON 

A stove is thrown out of a window high up, from an apartment at

Gare de l'Est, on the sunny side. Anything out of place can be lifted out

of one window, people as well. 

Soon the air was filled with books, clothes, a television, an unfinished painting,

unopened letters. Ancient coins in a well. Someone wanted me

to see this, I turned away. 

Passers-by stopped, looked up. The porter came, he

knew less than we did, just shrugged. A single word

stayed suspended in the air.

When I met Harald, I went to school at Sinsen Gymnasium and he at Berg. A friend of a friend, he was an impatient spectator during a football match in which I half-heartedly played. It was on the gravel-field behind the mall. Our mutual friend had told him that I, aged 16, was interested in art and literature. Harald walked onto the pitch during the match, straight up to me, shook my hand and told me about his relationship with Munch: his grandfather, Lucien, had been Munch's doctor. The referee blew his whistle and politely asked the young, strange man to leave the pitch. For the rest of the match, I went around in my own thought. On the sidelines, but obviously the main character, was Harald. Harald was of course an eccentric 16-year-old, and acted instinctively, but primarily he made fun of my interest in football. Looking back what I see clearer is the coexistence of the patterns of the pitch, the imprint from the studs on our soles, the places where the ball hit the ground, and how the hand touches the sheet of writing or drawing. Soon we went on holiday together, to his family's summer house. At the time, he dreamed of becoming a writer and I of becoming a painter.