Dagbladet, Oslo, Norway.

October 2, 2001

Cultural viewpoint

Review

EXIT A VIEW. Torild Stray’s drawing of Manhattan was executed from the World Trade Center, and it now appears, after – the fact, as a somber presentiment.

DYSTOPIA

and DANCE of DEATH

Review by Harald Flor Translated from Norwegian

by Rolf Kristian Stang.

Torild Stray‘s large New York panorama will be hanging through Thursday at Gallery 27 in Oslo; it is a prospect which one views through Thursday at gallery 27 in Oslo; it is a prospect which one views through new eyes after September 11^th’s suicide bombers inflicted incurable wounds on the metropolis.

Nonetheless, the impact of this enormous charcoal drawing – which was done two years ago –will awaken extraordinary associations with an earlier time.

For this more than 4-meters (14”) wide picture implies a vision beyond modernism’s most classical outlook, and is removed from that lust-for-life appetite now confronted by an ‘inedible’ Big Apple metaphor. Through the charged, age –old and symbolic drawing technique of charcoal, Stray conjures up a perception of Manhattan as an opposite pole to a living metropolis – in as much as the world’s perhaps most thoroughly structured urban configuration here relates as a city of death, a cemetery. The skyscrapers stand as solemn gravestones, and even the symmetrically perfect architecture of the Empire State Building

Has been shifted, heightening the drama and the delicate equilibrium integral to the picture’s expression.

In any case, it is our awareness of the fact that the vantage point of Stray’s panoramic drawing no longer exists, which makes the visually depressing sight result in a bodily shudder. Access to studio space on the 85^th floor in one of the twin towers gave her a privileged position artistically, even though she was going to mediate the feeling of an indisputable discomfort about her impression of the vista. Through the present context, the somber and expressive pentimenti are transformed from being solely a subjective reflection of a personal pain, as this solitary drawing in the gallery becomes, the, then. Something to read as a necrology tablet.