Elina Brotherus

Large de vue, Hommage à Erik Satie (2006)

The eccentric French composer Erik Satie put in precise playing instructions for those who perform his compositions. There were lots of these instructions, and they were far more detailed than the traditional largos and fortissimos..

Elina Brotherus has dedicated Large de vue (Breadth of Vision, 2006) to Erik Satie. Large de vue is a 45-part series of photographs, in which pictures she has taken at different times and in different places are combined with the instructions that Satie added to his Aperçus désagréables, completed in 1912. In her youth, Brotherus played this piece for four-handed piano with her teacher. Her teacher’s poetically free translations of the otherwise rather poetic instructions had stayed in her mind for a long time. Now, Satie’s original instructions in French – their meanings ranging from sufficiently slow to real and perceptible – are engraved into the glass covering the photographs. Large de vue is not just exceptional in Brotherus’ art, it is also important. This multipart work can be seen as a kind of synthesis, as a summation of what she had done before it, and as a bridge to all that has happened since. The work intersperses the low and yet lower horizons of The New Painting series (2000-04) with the personal, human-relationships themes from her earliest works (1997-99) and the Model Studies series begun in 2004. Brotherus prefers to seek out places where less means more, places that are already simplified, and where slight variations in light, colour and atmosphere are visible. The pictures in Large de vue are often from the Arctic North or from the shores of the oceans, places where there is a lot of room for light and air. In the majority of the pictures the sky is clear and full of light, often sparkling prismatically like Satie’s or Debussy’s impressionism. Brotherus is herself present in some of the pictures, sometimes seen from very close to, sometimes in a green raincoat with her back to us, like a sign. This recognisable figure anchors the different parts of the work both in each other and in the rest of her production. Large de vue is not a story, nor do we have to read it like a book, even though Satie’s instructions can be rolled round the tongue like the lines of a poem. Nor is this work a conceptual project intended to measure the distance between word and image, or their ability to alter each other’s tone. “The work is like a series of songs or a book of preludes. Each individual image can be looked at and listened to, we can watch how it glistens, and how it makes the others resonate,” is how Brotherus describes it..

(Modified from the article by Timo Valjakka: Elina Brotherus: Reflexive spaces, published in the catalogue for Elina Brotherus’ exhibition at Yapi Kredi Kazim Taskent Art Gallery, Istanbul, Oct. 2008.)