Nature isn’t always kind to itself. When storms rip through coastal landscapes, when forest fires devastate, when rain lashes the leaves and branches until they tear from their hold, the results can be brutal. Ravaged, splintered. As if nature hungers after itself, chews and tears, only to rebuild its own sustenance.

The landscapes in Mette Homar’s paintings can seem harrowed in the same naturally self-destructive way – if there is a rift it is of another kind than the one caused by human devastation. At the same time, the paintings have a certain calm about them. There is something ancient wallowing in the landscape – the spirit of nature that stands strong and proud and stunningly beautiful. Sometimes the trees in Homar’s nature depictions seem to be growing on a thin layer of earth: a crust that has born hundreds of thousands of years of vegetation and life. Humans are the passive objects, nature the active subject. Humans have been pushed aside or they have actively chosen to not participate. Hierarchies have shifted and landed just as it was meant from the beginning. 

The windswept impression is primarily based on the way Homar lets her work develop. There is a tempo in the pull of the oil pastels against the paper, a directness and almost unbridled movement in how the colour fields arise. Despite what the motif represents, the handling of the material and the approach to the creative process seem to border on the intuitive painting of abstract expressionism: freedom and spontaneity of movement. Here we witness a drive to depict, but with a greater emphasis on light, colour and movement than a realistic rendering.

Karolina Modig

(text excerpt from booklet)