What does it mean to see? Through an in-depth essay and exchange, written and led by artist Ina Hagen, you're invited to take a closer look at the artistic practice of Klepp born, Copenhagen based painter Kenneth Varpe. Discussing the concept of seeing – and seeing again – with colleague and friend Apichaya (Piya) Wanthiang, Hagen and Varpe take a deep dive into the ideas that shaped his work, currently showing at LNM in Oslo.
In its literal translation, gjensyn can be understood as ‘again-sight,’ closest perhaps to review or revision. Though the associations that typically follow these words in their everyday use, like the editing of a text or an assessment of a budget or a report, evade the significant emphasis on sight in gjensyn, that nevertheless is present in these translations as well. We can signal this emphasis in our choice of spelling, like ‘re-view’ or ‘re-vision,’ highlighting this visioning-again of something or someone that in the meantime had been out of sight, or maybe even lost to us. “På gjensyn,” which is a common parting phrase in Norwegian, becomes “upon (our) re-vision,” “until we see each other again,” or, “upon our mutual re-witnessing.”
What is it about this seeing again that Kenneth Varpe suggests to us, almost challenges us to consider, as the seers, the on-lookers, of his paintings?
It has been mentioned elsewhere that they are performative, playing the role of painting as painting (Campolmi, 2020), or illusory; exercises in doubling, permanently oscillating between oppositional pairs (Danielsen Jølbo, 2023). These readings present them as confounding works that evade simple categorization, even when they could seem to fit the bill—a sentiment that I share. There is clearly more going on here than what meets the eye at first glance.
For a moment therefore, let us consider the ocular sense: the matter of sight. We are able to see something visually because of the convergence of light waves, objects, and surface refraction, the eye—with its cornea, lens, vitreous body (that viscous medium that fills its hollow), photoreceptor cells, and optic nerve—and the conscious and subconscious mind, with its neural pathways, visual processing, memory storage, and conceptual frameworks. Although experienced as automatic, we can stop to conceptually consider every moment along this causal chain. And furthermore, in repeated looking, even at the same object under the same conditions (a sight frozen in time, like a photograph), new things are revealed to us, both from what we are looking at and from within ourselves. The thing we have seen is then subject to revision, but without light passing through the eye as a mental image. Sight becomes part of our inner landscapes this way. Though it operates differently there, as it is no longer bound by time and space, or by otherworldly constraints. This inner landscape stirs every time we look at the world around us.
The paintings on display here are made using a method that Varpe has been fine-tuning for years, and he considers them a continuation of this much larger body of painting. It involves a swift, almost automatic laying down of blobs of mixed and unmixed paint in generous, viscous layers onto small-scale pieces of board (he refers to them as ‘the miniatures’). The immediacy of these miniature compositions is of importance to Varpe, as a kind of gearing up to what follows, which is conversely a much longer process of a slowed down, curious, and particularly attentive form of looking. He says that a miniature is produced in 10 seconds, while a month is spent on each painted ‘copy.’ Out of all the miniatures produced in one sitting, he selects a small number that he stages for photography, paying special attention to the topographies of the painted surface, which he enhances with light and shadow.
A commonality between them that is not as immediately apparent as their shared subject matter is that he lights them from above. This is a reference to classical painting tradition and museum display, where the light, as if divine, is cast upon the painted subjects and the painting itself, from above. Once the photographs have been taken, Varpe begins his search within them for qualities that motivate their meticulous reproduction on canvas. Every painting comes about in this way.
But something has changed. As with the choice of lighting, the colour palettes too have tended to be indexical, referencing painterly tropes and historical colour palettes, or even the colours of one specific painting. An example is the French impressionist Gustave Caillebotte and his 1884 painting Homme au bain / Man at his bath. Caillebotte’s depiction of a naked, bathing man challenged commonly held attitudes toward masculinity and gender at the time. Recent art historical approaches to his oeuvre speculate on his sexual orientation and whether his choices of motifs can be understood as subtly political. There has been a sense of meaning for Varpe in paying homage to artists like Caillebotte, and considering them alongside, even overlapping with, his own biography. After his mother’s passing in 2024,however, Varpe has observed that his choice of colours is shifting ever closer to home, so to speak, and further from their analytical, art historical, and conceptual basis. This is not a categorical departure, or a break, but a slow-moving, affective readjustment. If a colour can be thought of as a memory reservoir, then what it evokes is already in us.
Throughout the month of August, Varpe, fellow painter and friend Apichaya Wanthiang, and I sat down for a series of conversations, guided by our curiosity about whether a different articulation of the stakes and vulnerabilities within these works could emerge between us. We shared a sense that in the practice of looking again (and again, and again), something could be revealed to us: questions of subjectivity, memory, identity; processes of understanding, of coping, and of accepting. A practice of re-vision, a rehearsal in re-viewing, an exercise in re-seeing – of gjensynsøvelser. What follows is a recounting of some of these conversations.
Over the past few years, you have been doing something that, on the surface, can seem almost identical. But for you, each exhibition is like a different chapter of a story that transforms. If I look at the work behind you now, I would not have picked up on the fact that much has shifted, from a first, superficial glance.
Because you are stretching out every moment of attention within your practice, the shifts seem so small, almost too small, to the point where it may not even be perceptible as movement. But one of the things that has struck me about these new paintings is that they have this affinity with Rorschach tests. I look at them, and I am more aware of the associations that emerge from their shapes than I had been before.
I remember in an earlier conversation we had, Piya, you said something along the lines of having, upon first superficial encounter, taken my work to be about only the gesture; a study of the painterly ‘trace.’ But there is hardly a trace of the brush anymore in these new motifs. It has more concretely become about the materiality, plasticity, and the almost bodily quality of paint. That is what I am drawn to in the miniatures: their existence as matter.
When I make the miniatures, I prepare all the paint and cards I need for maybe 40 of them, so that I can work very quickly. If there's a will to push or pull them in a specific direction, I try to reduce it. When I photograph them, I light them to help define their materiality, their impasto. And when I look at them on my computer, I zoom in as far as I can to reach beyond what I could possibly see when I was making it. It is like I am getting acquainted with it, after just briefly having met it. In spending this time scrutinizing, going into detail, in seeing things that I had not seen and that I did not “put” there, something is revealed. That is when I get intrigued; when I do not see my own gesture but something else. I am more curious to see what appears in the paint itself than to retrace my intention in brush strokes.
For many years, I would throw the miniatures away. It's only in the last year and a half that I've actually kept them. I thought that they were unfair images for the painting to be scrutinized against. That if I showed them, people would immediately go into this activity of comparing them, and of seeing to what extent I succeeded in replicating them. Maybe that is kind of what I'm dealing with; living up to something. And this question of whether the miniature itself should remain a myth is something I consider very carefully.
I’m interested in the tension between revealing and withholding in your work; of giving but also concealing. And I am curious about the strategies that we devise as artists that become paths towards something we do not yet know; ways that we allow the work to reveal itself to us, or to unfold, as it is being made. But also, perhaps, that allows us to feel in control of what we hide and reveal about ourselves.
I am thinking about what it means for me, as a viewer, to encounter something that is the result or the outcome of someone’s elaborate, elongated process of intimately knowing something, when I cannot immediately see the progression within that process in the things on display. With craft objects and artworks, we recognize the effort that has gone into them, right? Somehow, the material process, the tension, and the care that is put into a material thing is felt. It resonates on a bodily level. I guess you could argue that a similar process is happening here, upon first encounter with your work.
That initial friction is something that, for people that I speak to about the work, is an entry point into the work exactly because the time and effort that has been put into it is visible. There is a tension between the meticulousness and effort that has gone into making it, and the motif which has this immediate appearance of being “just a painting of paint.” Then there is the issue of the process itself, and why and how I want to give people insight into it. I think that is why I have invited you two to have this conversation with me, to sort of unpack that. Because the process is relevant to the project.
One thing that is interesting to me about the way you speak about your process is that you have previously described it not as something you have constructed, but a result of a longing for something. Still, it is almost like you need to develop a system or strategy for yourself to ‘trick’ yourself into allowing certain things to happen. I think that is a constructed methodology in itself, only it is working towards another end.
It seems you have been wanting to make a distinction between a construction that is calculated, that is about control, and a construction that has more to do with practicing embodiment, where you check in with yourself and try to feel if the process is sensible. So maybe I can understand the dislike towards the word ‘constructed’. I've been interested in unpacking these Western dualities of mind vs. body, concept vs. feeling, and so on. For me, they're very intertwined. I think there's something about that binary that just doesn't serve us well. Maybe we can find a better word instead of constructed, maybe it has something more to do with a feeling-knowing. Perhaps we have to make up words that actually underline that quality.
It is also perhaps about scaling down or stripping back some of the dominant ideas of what progression or development should look like. Similarly, this difficulty of pinning it down is not a problem to be solved, you know? It is a quality of the work to me. I would like to understand how we can meaningfully engage with something that is difficult in that way, without giving into our drive to somehow make it less difficult? A hegemonic simplification like the dualisms that Piya has mentioned.
I think these tensions of opacity and transparency, desire and withdrawal, simplification and difficulty, all reside in a field that the work tries to expand. To me, your work provokes thinking about what something being hard to place feels like, and how we can sit with that uncertainty. You could say it could be about something that is difficult, which is what I just named it as, but it can equally be about an undecided position, or an ambiguity. Why do we reach for quick decisions or quick judgments about what things are, instead of sitting with that discomfort of not knowing exactly?
For me, the work is loaded with potentiality, an ambiguity or a fluidity, that I am happy to see recognized. Ina, you spoke along similar lines before as well when you said that it is like the work sets the stage for the object and image to simultaneously exist. Because that is very much my drive with it. I strive for a continuous movement between positions, of being an image and an image of an image, between being and representing.
Representasjon is not the best word in Norwegian. There is a synonym that I like better which is forestilling (the imagined). The reason why I like this word is that it also hints to imagination. It is about pretending to be something else but there is also an element of imagination there. The trickery itself is not a big deal for me. Piya, you have previously pointed out that maybe what I want to challenge is how quick we are to make assumptions. And that is it. It is most important to me that people question what they see.
And then, depending on how interested you are in the discourse of painting, or how familiar you are with gesture-making or expressionist traditions, then there are other levels to unpack. But at the core of my practice is a desire to play with those quick assumptions. Is the paint just itself, or is it also a representation? I enjoy that the paintings do not allow themselves to be fixed in either of those, because it constantly shifts. It shifts with your point of view, with your attention, your focus.
One obvious association would be that you're doing something that is seemingly very expressive. And in the history of painting, this expressive thing is predominantly tied to white, heteronormative culture. And within white culture, it was mostly men who were “allowed” to express themselves in that particular way. There were, of course, a whole range of others who were not able to, accepted for, or given the permission to express themselves like that.
The Abstract Expressionist gesture is supposed to be this ‘big’ gesture that expresses your innermost feelings. But the way you do it is on a smaller scale. Your expressionism is premeditated, small, and still has an expressiveness to it. The affinities and associations that your work triggers are not like that of Abstract Expressionism. So, I think your work is blurring these categorical associations that we are used to connecting to this kind of work.
When I was more formally oriented, I spent some time looking at the New York School as one of many sources of influence. Especially the second wave, of which there were some women of course, like Helen Frankenthaler, but mostly white, heteronormative men as you point out. I still go between seeing my paintings as figuration and seeing them as flat colour fields. It is still true that I am involved in a process of flattening: from the flattening of the miniature when it's photographed, in its reproduction, to the way the paintings oftentimes are viewed on a screen, on Instagram or wherever. So, there is this kind of surface thing about it all. But as you pointed out, I think my approach is motivated by something different than how those early influences are usually perceived.
When I paint, I feel a sense of care and responsibility for the paint that is on the miniature that I am in the process of reproducing. I cannot just leave it if the illusion has not arrived to where I want it to be. Like, “I really have to push the depth and shadow so that a viewer can understand that this is a substance that lies underneath the other, and this one is arching over, so there has to be a clear drop shadow here,” is the sort of thing that I am occupied with. I'm trying to understand the choreography that has taken place in the paint. And though they are traces of me, they are not, as you point out, these big, gestural, bodily expressions. They are reduced, and I enlarge them again but in another way.
In an earlier iteration of my painting series, I was looking more closely at the trace of the brush; what happens when the brushstroke changes, or when it becomes self-aware? I used to go to museums and get up really close to impressionist paintings and look at them as close as one can possibly get in a museum. I attempted to decipher the actual lumps of paint, with their highlight gloss and tiny shadow.
The way I work with light and shadow mimics, on the one hand, how objects have been lit in historical painting, both in the Baroque and Romantic periods when the subject matter deemed worth depicting was either historical or religious. On the other hand, it hints at the way that paintings are displayed in museums where light normally is directed from above but from the front. This is the condition under which I have encountered the impressionist paintings I have studied too. I purposefully integrate this into my work, which situates it squarely within the traditional space of painting both as object and as subject matter.
In this vein, a newer question for me has been: what happens when it is raw paint from the tube that is replicated on the canvas? When the painterly gesture is more subdued or even ambiguous? When I load the photos onto my computer is when I actually see what is in the miniature paintings. I appreciate how the colours are reflected in each other, that the ‘whiteness’ of an area of a white changes because it is next to a pink or a red. These are also traditional picture making strategies from still lifes for example where the paint assumes an almost spatial resonance. Depending on the quality of the paint and how well it was mixed, I am also witnessing how the colours start to break up. I can see pigments, I see transitions of paint that are not blended very well, and I have committed to faithfully reproducing all of that. In some places, although that's so small, there are traces of a colour’s neighbour. To me, it really becomes about their inter-relationality.
In listening to you describe how you pay attention to the interactions happening within the colours, I have to think about your attitude towards making work, as I know it. I think that you like for things to be implicit. When we were in preparation for a talk we did for LNM’s discursive series Painters in Dialogue in 2023, I remember you spoke of the more personal aspect of hiding yourself. Of all the things that, as a gay man, you do not put at the forefront of your work, but which are the backdrop against which it always exists. I found it fascinating that you talked about politics following from the work, and not as a predetermined agenda for it. I was thinking about that as a strategy, this attitude or temperament that we don't think of as a part of work as often, but that becomes something that directly informs the decision-making process.
I do think that there is a subtle politic to the gesture of giving attention, dedication, and time to these small things that I cannot even see without the aid of the camera. Paint is the medium that normally is in service of the narrative, but here, it becomes the main character. I see this shift as queering in that I am subverting the role and the function that the paint normally has, which is to be in service to something else. Paint has historically always been pointing elsewhere. When looking at grisailles that allude to, or “pretend to be” plaster reliefs, in churches or in Palazzos, for example, we can see that within that representation, there is a double representation because within the painted plaster there is also a motif.
Said in a more light-hearted way, I feel that I am setting the paint “free” by not forcing it to represent or be in service to something other than itself. I am giving it a break: “you can just be you.” I enjoy this fluidity that I have mentioned: it is a representation of itself, but it is also just itself. Take the colour blue; although it is a picture or representation of paint in the colour blue, it is also simply blue paint – the colour blue. Some of it is blue paint. Then again, some of it is blue mixed with brown and red, some of it is blue mixed with yellow. Some of it is blue straight from a tube, while some of it is shades I have mixed myself.
I think the reason why I always come back to this framing is that this is the ambiguity that I am after. I'm happy for the work to be in that fluid state. In a way, I'm happy for it on its behalf.
When I was sitting with one of the most recent paintings, which I usually do for three or four weeks at a time, many unexpected things unfolded inside of me. While giving my attention to the colour red, it became clear to me that I was looking at the precise colour of a pair of trousers that my mother wears in a photograph of us together from when I was child. I have been in the process of looking through photo albums and that sort of thing – things to keep, things to throw away, you know. What the painting allowed for, suddenly, was to revisit that memory. As mentioned, there have always been aspects of the medium and history of painting that I have wanted to address in my works. But with these new ones, other types of meanings have emerged from the colours irrespective of my intention. After, not before the painting. After my mom passed, I have come to appreciate, or experience rather, that they are not really pointing to painterly tropes outside of themselves anymore. They are more free-standing now, which perhaps comes with a seeming instability. But I understand it as a potential that is allowed to remain unresolved. I think that is a good thing, a generative thing.
You have previously mentioned that you were searching through the miniatures for images that capture more of that potentially this time around, a quality to express an associative space. And there is perhaps a stronger psychological association to the colours in this most recent series, like the Rorschach tests. What is happening in your work makes me think about an idea of technology that I have recently fallen in love with. After spending time with a variety of texts, I've come to think of technology as anything that shapes a material reality or a subjectivity. It is not only the most obvious things we think of as technology, like TV or the internet, but also languages, images, law, architecture, and social codes that shape what is possible. It can be the way we look at something, the way something is expressed, the way we speak, or the way we choose to paint.
The method I have arrived at has not been constructed as a way for me to comment on painting. It has rather evolved as my longing for a certain painterly space has gradually formulated itself as the project. This method creates a space that is doing me good, that allows me to integrate many aspects. And I think that it allows me to integrate who I was when I initially abandoned painting, shortly after my BA.I have come to realize that this is a space where I can heal myself a little, from this period when I disintegrated, or when I separated out parts of my identity. I did not accept the reality of being a gay man, being hyperconscious of the image that I projected outwards. There are still traces of that, running underneath the surface which I think I am processing when I am painting.
I have not had the language for this until now. I just registered that it is healing. I see that there are so many moments of reflection, about my position within my family, how I have presented and represented myself, how I think I have been perceived, and it is just happening because of this; that I make an image, try to reproduce a shape and a colour.
I am very interested in this idea, that it might be healing. I think that is actually a bit of a taboo among painters. Painters seem to be allergic to talk about their paintings as healing. But why? Why do we not actually hone in on this quality and really look at what that is? To me, it’s such an essential part of painting that is seldom unpacked properly.
When thinking about what you're saying now Piya, about healing, I think it can be argued that an expressionist painting practice can have this kind of undercurrent, whether it's articulated or not, of catharsis as a mode of “healing". That in expressing big feelings with big gestures, there is a kind of offloading of a trauma, for example. But I think it is potent to talk about integration when it comes to healing. Of opening up for critically but compassionately assessing the impact of someone that we’ve lost, or of an injustice that has been done to us, to name two examples. And to think about the process of attuning yourself to not just the world around you and your inner life, but also to the consequences of your contact with the world. I think you're in that landscape already Kenneth. You were using the word integration yourself, and I think that is a much more interesting and meaningful way of going into this conversation about the potential for healing through the process of making, than what the concept of catharsis allows for.
I just noticed that now; in trying to talk about it, I looked out the window instead of looking at you. Because it is a topic that I cannot really grasp fully. But I can remain in it simply because I'm registering that it's doing me good. Some days I get completely taken aback, and then I just think: “what the hell am I doing here? I am spending so much time on this manic thing, trying to reproduce these little, tiny blobs of paint, and they are not even pointing to anything.” But then, when I'm back the next day and I get into it, I just register in the body that it's meaningful. It has become a way for me to see: Can I sit with this? Can this also be okay as a way to be making work?
I think for me, politics and technology are intertwined. So, I would argue that the infrastructure you have built for yourself in order to make work is where its politics lay. And then: what does that propose for the rest of us? Does it change anything in how we think about making work in general? I think there lies potential political implications, and also potential relationships to an external world, that are beyond you.
I was curious to think about your motivation to slow down judgment and create space for ambiguity and fluidity, within a relational frame. In thinking with the analogy of human relationships, then it seems to me that the better you know someone, the more space you have to accept the incongruences and contradictions that inevitably will exist within that person. You know? I was thinking that there's a sort of grouping that happens in these new paintings which I immediately read as relational. If they are Rorschach tests, I see families, weirdly. It is as if there are these family systems playing themselves out there, in shapes and colours.
I have devised this strategy, or methodology, or technology that serves a function for me. It is like this navigation through a doing, of sensing where it ‘sits', where there is an echo of something. This process has taken a certain shape that enables something to happen which, right now, means that I integrate a lot of aspects of myself, including thoughts about painting, my relation to my family, and even grief.
I have to say, I learn a lot about the paintings when I see them together in an exhibition. That is the first time they all “meet.” Otherwise, they mostly exist in small groups or alone, or they go off somewhere, maybe into storage, maybe into someone's home or somewhere. The exhibition is the most unusual situation for them in that way. And a place in which to witness that slow moving change. What has happened in the process of making them?
I was mainly paying attention to the change from my interest in the brush to the matter on its own. But I realized that there is also a change in which motifs I am attracted or drawn to. A really useful idea for me is this notion of the “political with a small p.” This attitude entails an insistence on the minuscule details that are given a lot of attention and importance through their expansion, both in time and space. Perhaps this is also a way for me to counter contemporary image culture, where we expect to “get” something very quickly. Going to my Instagram feed is like going to the Venice Biennial on speed. You get exhausted by this experience that there is so much work out there, all with their own universe and logic of meanings and references. And in consuming so much at the same time, you become too blasé and have to navigate by whether something speaks to you quite quickly. Hopefully there is an element of reflection on that in my work.
Why engage and spend so much time, or devote focus, attention, and time on something that is…yes, what exactly? Because what is this double position of the paint being itself and being a representation of itself; an image and the coming-of-an-image simultaneously. It is always this deliberation that goes on: can it be a representation of itself or not? Can it only be itself or not?
Your comment about how we usually encounter images made me think about the idea of rehearsal. If just encountering something is an experience that teaches us a technology, or that trains us to do something, or to think, see, feel something, then perhaps encountering your kind of images is already doing something that is counter to how we usually see imagery. By the fact that this kind of painting is very focused methodologically, by expanding itself within all of the steps that go into the making of it. What the painting is performing is perhaps not something that necessarily can be captured verbally, but is rather an experiential encounter that offers a different frame –his queering that you mentioned.
It is interesting that you say the word “exercises”, because my title at the moment is gjensynsøvelser, which is difficult to translate to English but can maybe be expressed as “exercises in seeing again”.
It is also interesting that I used the word rehearsal, while you heard the word exercises, and they are similar, but they are not the same.
Øvelse can be translated to practice as well, which I think suits our conversation.
We are returning to a moment now, where I think about repetition, reiteration, practice and not outcome. What has become prominent for me, is that I have started to think of your work more as something that is rooted in and defined by practice and methodology, rather than outcome. I think we are so trained to think about outcome as the work, but what if that is not the work? What if all the technologies that we devise, and our commitment to reiterating and repeating –to rehearsing –it, is as much the work as what is exhibited?
The text is based on a series of conversations between Apichaya Wanthiang, Ina Hagen and Kenneth Varpe, and is written by Ina Hagen.
Kenneth Varpe: GJENSYNSØVELSER
LNM
16 October – 16 November 2025
Siren Løkaas skriver her om Kenneth Varpes utstilling «Fluid Pose» i Bryne Mølle, som i følge henne evner å dra beskueren inn ”på en altoppslukende måte,” men som også lukker seg om seg selv i en kyndig men ensartet utforskning av egne kunstneriske prosesser og kunsthistoriske motiv.
Den 57. Venezia-biennalen, VIVA ARTE VIVA, er designet med kunstnere, av kunstnere og for kunstnere – rundt formene de foreslår, spørsmålene de stiller, praksisene de utvikler og måtene de velger å leve på, skriver kurator Christine Macel i katalogens introduksjonstekst. Kunstner og kurator Karolin Tampere og kunstner Kenneth Varpe besøkte Venezia-biennalen i september, og gjennom en samtale omkring et utvalg arbeider deler de her sine opplevelser og refleksjoner fra de to dagene i form av tekst, foto og lydopptak.
Billedkunstner Kenneth Varpe er høsten 2016 aktuell med to gruppeutstillinger i henholdsvis London og Oslo. Utstillingen “Artificial Paradise: A Study of Intoxication” på Six Second Gallery i London tok for seg ulike undersøkelser av beruselsen og dens sterke tilstedeværelse i kunsthistorien. I Oslo er Varpe del av den større gruppeutstillingen "En Kollektiv Psykogeografisk Guide til Oslo" (EKPGO) som er del av Tegnebiennalen 2016. I dette intervjuet snakker Varpe om sin kunstneriske praksis og hvordan verkene han stiller ut forholder seg til de overordnede utstillingstematikkene.