"Kolbjørn Håseth"

Kant's notion of the dynamic sublime is a great starting place for gaining a handhold on understanding Kolbjørn Håseth's work, although perhaps in a sly, slanted way. For Kant, the dynamic sublime was a feeling of the greatness of nature - a tornado, the ocean, a storm of great magnitude - and a kind of absolute surrendering to that greatness. To be caught up in these phenomena is to be completely powerless. To resist, a meaningless gesture, and therefore, in recognizing this, we no longer fear these things because it's not rational to fear something we can't do anything about anyway.

If you see Håseth as capturing the dynamic sublime - the immensity of the ocean or the desolation of a empty expanse - his paintings take on this aspect where the reality of the subject and the unreality of the artifice begin to confuse our aesthetic sense. What is terrifying is not the impossibility of surmounting the massive, destructive capabilities of nature, but rather how Håseth depicts a world devoid of human vestiges.

-Andrew Beckerman