Four Rules for a Friendship (and Tone Berg Størseth’s art)

 

1. A friendship starts with a tiny spark that develops into something beautiful (with the potential of developing into something disastrous). Like the mold Tone grows on paper, making a new friend is a controlled way of loosing control. Not that I considered this when I first talked to Tone in Berlin in 2015. I just wanted to keep talking forever.

 

2. A friendship has it’s own structure. The specific anatomy of a friendship is difficult to render, but I relate it to the drawings where Tone traces lines as close to the previous ones as possible. The length of the strokes corresponds to the range of Tone’s arm. Our actions in a friendship also correspond to our own reach.

 

3. A friendship is an image that over time will change and take shape as a new image (with the old image behind the new one). When I visited Tone’s studio for the first time I remember her beautiful glass coffee brewer and that she told me she often use old canvases with works already on them for new works.

 

4. A friendship is pleasant. What is pleasant in Tones work: the shapes, the ideas, the colors. An intimate, confidential and gentle way of being (a person and an art work) creates a safe place for thinking.

 

Victoria Durnak

October 2017