Weightless: The Paintings of Henrik Uldalen
Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen captures people in oils with all the precision and clarity of a camera. He then places these incredibly lifelike images in impossible scenes. Uldalen’s models float in blank spaces. They precariously climb staircases that spiral upside down. They fall from buildings that tilt at odd angles. The Oslo-based artist’s work isn’t so much photorealism as it is photosurrealism.
Uldalen’s people frequently appear with eyes closed, prompting onlookers to wonder if the characters are dreaming, or even if they are alive. “It’s mainly to emphasize the feeling of being detached from the real world,” he explains, “like the character in the painting is in between worlds—inside of a dream or in limbo.”
Sometimes, they lay flat on the canvas with skin so pale it’s tinged a hypothermic shade of blue. He likes to work with very pale people—“Skin that looks almost translucent… a shade of blue under their eyes, and skin that bruises easily,” he describes—which lends to the almost ghostly quality of his work.
Other times, their hair lies in clumps as water drips down faces like the byproduct of a fever dream. There is never a clear-cut answer inside Uldalen’s paintings. Each one can mean a myriad different things, can capture manifold emotions. “You don’t need to know my life story to enjoy my paintings,” says Uldalen.
For Uldalen, every painting starts with a photo.
“It takes a lot of directing to get the photo right,” says Uldalen. He works mainly with people he knows personally simply because it tends to be easier to rope friends into modeling sessions. Uldalen doesn’t go into the photo shoots with a solid idea of what he wants. He spends a lot of time deliberating over poses, adjusting and readjusting everything from the models’ clothing to the position of their fingers.
“The whole photo shoot looks incredibly clumsy, since I’m not a photographer,” Uldalen admits. He adds that he’s not incredibly skilled in behind-the-lens work, it’s more of a means to an end and his least favorite part of the process.
The photos are only the seeds for Uldalen’s creations. They don’t dictate the final product. Uldalen is more concerned with the mood of the piece than an accurate recreation of a photo. Oftentimes, he needs to stray far from the original image in order to establish the desired effect.
Every photo Uldalen will use in a painting goes through Photoshop. He cuts up the photographs, sometimes pasting pieces into other images. He’ll alter the colors, turn people and objects into strange positions—“Take an arm here, and a face there,” he says—anything that will help evoke the dreamy quality that runs through his work. In a sense, a lot of what seems very real in the paintings isn’t. The skin tones often differ in appearance from the source photos and the backgrounds have either been altered or removed completely. At the same time, though, he does say that he wants the character in the painting to look like the model. “But, that’s only to challenge myself,” he adds.
Born in 1986, Uldalen is a young artist with a distinctive voice and an incredible skill. He has been drawing since childhood and studied to be an art teacher, but considers himself primarily a self-taught painter. He went online to look up oil painting tips and found friends with a similar interest. “We learned from each other,” he says.
He’s only been working in oils for about four years, which makes his work all the more impressive. “I always read that oils were much harder to work with,” he says. “For me, oil painting was so much easier. When I first tried oil painting, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”
His interest is primarily in painting people. He’s not so interested in the backgrounds. In fact, many of pieces are heavy on negative space. He likes to create “something dynamic and exciting to watch with very little.”
When he does include backgrounds, they are typically landscapes or pieces of city buildings. These are semi-inspired by his surroundings in Norway. The urban touches, he says, could come from any city. “There really isn’t too much ‘urban’ to be found in Norway, being it’s a small country and Oslo is a small city.” The landscapes in Uldalen’s work, often frosty and always filled with tall trees, are undoubtedly Norwegian. He refers to the country’s pockets of natural landscapes as “beautiful and spectacular, and very inspiring.”
Still, the people are always central to Uldalen’s work. For a forthcoming show at Culver City gallery Thinkspace, the painter has had to adapt his style to fit a very specific theme. Wild at Heart: Keep Wildlife in the Wild is a group show presented in connection with Born Free USA to raise awareness on the plight of animals whose natural habitats are disappearing. The thing is, Uldalen doesn’t usually paint animals. “It was a big challenge,” he says. But, Uldalen came up with a solution. He imagined someone floating in front of a building with an intricate, stone-like facade. The centerpiece is the head of an elephant. “I think the animal theme is quite subtle in my painting,” he says. However, it works.
It takes Uldalen between two weeks and a month to complete a painting and he only works on one piece at a time. “I never work on multiple paintings,” he says. “It only stresses me out.”
Regardless of the pace at which he works, Uldalen has built up an impressive portfolio of gorgeous paintings. In Norway, he says that he’s had a good reaction to his work, but the country’s small size has a bit of a drawback.
“There is perhaps not the biggest scene for my type of art here,” he notes. “I kind of fall between the chairs of conceptual art and the Nerdrum-school,” he adds, referencing the famed Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum.
While Uldalen may not quite fit inside Norway’s art world, he’s done well there, having racked up three solo shows in Oslo since 2009. He has also shown on his own in Denmark. Although he hasn’t had a solo show outside of Europe yet, Uldalen has taken part in several group shows in Los Angeles and New York. No doubt, the world will be taking notice of this painter’s breathtaking vision very soon.*
This article originally appeared as the cover feature in Hi-Fructose Issue 24, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
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