In November 2014, coinciding with Paris Photo, a collaborative Norwegian project opens in Paris showing a solo exhibition with photographer Morten Andenæs, in addition to a magazine launch and an artist talk between Andenæs and Lucas Blalock.
The exhibition green apples / blue sky is the first presentation of Morten Andenæs’ photographic works in France.
The exhibition title corresponds literally to two of the photographs on show; blue sky and green apples. The indexical nature of the title, revealing nothing but what experience subsequently will show, sets the stage for a short circuit. Simultaneously this recurring gesture mirrors photography’s condition as a reiteration or addition to reality that points to something reality is not able to articulate on its own. By explicitly stating that which otherwise might be incited through our desires and fantasies, Andenæs thwarts our capacity to freely project onto the photographs.
The latter becomes especially evident in Viktoria’s dirty little secret, blue sky or the picture studies from the series FUCK. Rather than allowing for the private play of fantasies, these photographs become injunctions and public spectacle. This leakage between the private and the public points to the complicity between the observer and the observed, and in the end mirrors the sticky symbiosis between state and individual, typical of social democracies.
The works on display all stem from Andenæs’ ongoing project Regarding the middle class. As an overarching theme, the project and exhibition deals with the inherited constraints imposed on the individual from family and society, as well as the ensuing violent impulses such restrictions might cause.
