Per Inge BJØRLO

From the very beginning of his career, Per Inge Bjørlo (born 1952) has worked with industrial waste and utilized industrial expertise. In 1980 he moved to Hønefoss and in order to get to know his surroundings it was natural for Bjørlo to contact industry--a milieu with which he was familiar with from his childhood and youth close by the city of Ålesund. He acquired contacts who collected used and scrapped machine parts in rubber and later glass and also pieces of mirrors which he used in his installations. In 1985 he was commissioned to carry out decorative work for Follum Factories. They put a studio at his disposal free of charge and ever since, Bjørlo has been associated with this paper-producing factory. There he has his studio and the freedom of the large factory premises and also at hand are expertise, machines and a working milieu.

In earlier installations Bjørlo's theme has been man's crisis in confrontation with late industrial society. The series of installations Inner Room I-V which was carried out over a period of six years deals with such psychic themes as claustrophobia and angst. At the same time Bjørlo has explored various materials such as rubber, glass, iron, hair and stainless steel. The installations have always been characterized by their totality in which objects, lighting and, as a rule, odours are combined in a complex whole. The first installation with rubber, in a basement gallery at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in 1984, remains an installation that attracted the greatest attention in Norway. In this installation industrial waste was used both metaphorically as a symbol of the industrial era and sensually concrete as a strongly smelling, heavy organic material. The entire space as filled with worn-down tyres and inner tubes from lorries, used protective blasting mats and accumulations of rubber strips, bundled and bound by chains and suspended from the ceiling--and in between these hung Bjørlo's large expressive black-white lino-cuts.

The next installations in the series Inner Room I-V were shown at the Art Biennale in Sao Paulo in 1985, during Norealis at Gallery Daad in Berlin in 1986, at the Biennale in Venice in 1988, at the Borealis Exhibition in Denmark in Louisiana, Denmark in 1989 and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo in 1990. Different types of materials such as mirror splinters, hair and stainless steel were tried out. Lighting and radiating heat played a very active part in several of the installations. In the Berlin installation the floor was covered with glass splinters, and on this towered rusty light constructions with blindingly strong light bulbs.

The emotional experience of Bjørlo's installations has something to do with one's feet. He jerks the spectator away from his of her accustomed, physical fixed point in that he changes the underlying matter. The Rubber Room at the Henie Onstad Art Centre gave a soft, sinking feeling; the mirror splinters in Berlin combined with the lamps conveyed an uncomfortable, unsure feeling; the smooth walkway in steel into which the spectators surprisingly were led at the Bergen Art Association, Music Festival Exhibition in 1991 imparted, to me at least, a sudden fear of losing my footing, and even though the distance to fall was not great, the fear of heights was awakened.

Bjørlo's reaction to society is personal and not social. The paradox is that Bjørlo, by going to lenghts of self-revelation, makes himself unassailable. In laying himself bare, he makes it difficult for anyone to take a critical attitude to his artistic project.

Bjørlo frees himself from a strictly formal tradition in as much as he wishes to mould fundamental feelings, or his own physcical-emotional memories, and then at the next moment to provoke a certain malaise in the spectator. If the spectator dares to let this malaise affect him, it opens the door to questions of a social, historical and psychic nature.

Per Inge Bjørlo has made exhibitions all over the world, including Art Biennale, Sao Paulo, The XLII International Biennale, Venice and the ARS 95 in Helsinki. Decorating commissions, among others, from Ålesund Airport, Gjøvik Olympic Mountain hall and Oslo Airport, Gardermoen.

November 2000