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"Jonna Pedersen paints striking paintings of what she sees and she works on her motives with originality and nerve..." "her talent is obvious. It seems fair to say, her ability comes naturally to her..." "...extremely forceful, direct and sensuous. There is no room for harmless decoration, rather tease the audience with paintings that have a nerve..." "Jonna Pedersen's artistic expression is deeply personal and commonly touching. She makes paintings using both brains and heart. Paintings that allow questions." "...Jonna Pedersen's composition "Cold Sheets in Berlin" bespeaks the bleakness of an unsuccessful romantic assignation in Heartbreak Hotel with its simplified sink, empty mirror, and snot-green walls. Pedersen melds these unattractive seeming elements into an oddly harmonious and appealing composition by virtue of her unerring sense of the tensions inherrent in space, as well as her abillity to make essentially drab color combinations resonate emotionally. In this regard she reminds one of the group of British painters known as The Kitchen Sink School, led by John Bratby, who endeavored to capture the grimness of the postwar period. "...The first picture Jonna Pedersen ever painted was a copy of a work by the Danish Cobra artist Asger Jorn that she fell in love with in the Silkeborg Museum. For a while, earlier in her career, she worked in a similarly frenzied gestural manner, before becoming enamored of the bland facades of shops on streets devoid of people, yet somehow seemingly haunted by their absence. The urban environment that Pedersen evokes suggests the aftermath of one of those "smart bombs" that can supposedly wipe out an entire population without destroying property - a Godsend, some might say, given the relative value of real estate over human life in today's world. Sans signs of life, everything appears pristinely undisturbed in Pedersen's paintings. But while Denmark is technically a welfare state, remnants of rampant consumerism are everywhere evident in the variety of signs plastering the storefronts. Not knowing Danish makes them all the more intriguing, even though Pedersen supplies English titles. In "Tanning Salon," under the shopfront that says "Consol Solcenter," a poster in the window shows a tiny figure in a swimsuit exulting with upraised arms on a beach. Since the human presence is so rare in Pedersen's paintings, this minuscule detail seems almost spooky, a remnant of vanished natural joy embalmed in an urban mausoleum as alien as one of Yves Tanguy's surrealist boneyards. The desolate effect is enhanced by Pedersen's meticulously detailed style, in which acrylics are employed like tempera paints to produce flat, dry-looking color areas that can appear simultaneously bright and muted. She paints every brick in an obsessive manner reminiscent of Ben Shahn's early social realist cityscapes; yet her jazzy use of commercial signage and abruptly cropped word fragments as abstract shapes recalls Stuart Davis. |