In Birk Bjørlo's second solo exhibition at Gether Contemporary I Took a Look at the Sun and it Gave me a Headache we are confronted with our own body, through Bjørlo's expressive and non-figurative paintings.

Light and darkness flicker for our eyes. The multiple painted layers visualize a state of mind or an inner space, rather than an actual place. Bjørlo builds on the existentialist idea of the Nordic landscape painting, but breaks with tradition with his non-figurative nature, which vibrates as a tactile primeval mass on the canvases. The works examine the concept of light, and thus darkness as well. Large colour fields light up like the sun, and keep us at a distance of the large canvases, while smaller dark canvases suck us in, like black holes in an intangible large universe.

In the concept of light lies a duality. When we turn our heads towards the sun, we are blinded and at the same time illuminated. The light illuminates our body. We are confronted with our own longing and current condition; with the inner and outer landscape we find ourselves in.

It is an immediate bodily experience, which confronts us when facing Bjørlo's visualizations of light and dark. An experience that resonates the sublime - that which cannot be comprehended with logics or explained in words, but instead here leaves its trace, in the viewer, as bodily experience. We are present in front of Bjørlo's works and we feel the presence of the works.