Although Kristin Vestgård speaks mainly through her paintings and, probably, also prefers it that way, she wrote, in 2009, this statement about her art.

“It’s an intuitive process. In chaos, I play with figures, altering their spaces, wiping off and keeping marks from previous layers. While creating new spaces over others until I obtain a certain atmosphere and the expression that I want…which is something I find while going along…a history is built into the canvas, and adds weight and poetry to the final image... I paint out of my inner world with all the sights, emotions, thoughts, people, things, atmospheres and the history that runs through me. It all shapes what happens on the canvas…almost like a diary with no words, based in a reality seen through my eyes. It has dreams, fantasies and sort of inner adventures tangled in between the pure reality, playing between the restless and standing still, always in a flux…a playfulness running in and out of the layers of oil paint, with a deep sincere essence holding it together. To me my paintings hold many secrets…and I like it that way. It gives them space to breathe and live their own lives; just like people…they have a sea of secrets too… I believe my paintings are the voice of my silence.”

Jean Luc Godard, one of the founding filmmakers of the French ‘New Wave’, once said, “It is not where you take things from; it is where you take things to”. In this sense, with Kristin Vestgård’s paintings, I believe that it is not as important to know exactly what an image means, as it is to sense or feel that it does mean something. And it is, at least for me, the capturing of this special unsaid ‘something’ that is so striking in her work. It all comes down to this indefinable quality that some have and some have not. Kristin Vestgård has it, herself, as well as in her paintings.

I come from cinema and make images and sounds for the screen with the written word. And the literate meaning of these few sentences is how close I can get with my tools, with words. Kristin Vestgård’s paintings can be written about, but they need, because of this ‘something’, that goes beyond the expression of words, to be seen and to be experienced. What I personally find, while looking at her paintings, is that they take me somewhere words can not go. As a man of words, that is really saying something. This ‘something’ really speaks to me, and I know to many other different people.

This tells me that there is an element within Kristin Vestgård’s paintings that comes close to the core of not only being a human being, but actually being ‘human’. Roy Batty, the ‘robot’, played by the Dutch actor Rutger Hauer in Ridley Scott’s classic film Blade Runner, based up on Philip K. Dick’s book ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ said, “If you only could see what I have seen with your eyes.” And, as impossible as that sounds, through Kristin Vestgård’s paintings at least, I think, we can.

Jørn Kurt Bergo, Åsgårdstrand, Norway, March 2010