Greensword, an exhibition of drawings. How Green is Green, Actually? Art can hardly be greener than grass – nor greener than this exhibition. The entire main room is awash in green pictures. Verdigris, grass-green, algae-green and shock green! How green is green, actually? Vigdis Hareide seems to inquire through her paintings and photographs of grass and other green objects from nature. Quite, is the answer. She calls her show in Stavanger Kunstforening “Grønnsvær” (“Greensward”), yet it is not nature that she has installed in the gallery, but an artistic treatment of a colour naturally abundant in the summer, yet shunned or subdued by most artists due to its intensity. Quite the opposite for Hareide, who focuses fully on a colour that in art can easily pose an irritating distraction. Here there is no thought of quelling, down-toning or refining. Instead, she shocks with a jolting first impression. But upon nearing the pictures, hung side-by-side, often equal in their intense greenness and from the distance difficult to distinguish as either photographs or paintings, you discover a wonderful interplay of nuances and variations. It then becomes clear that green is not just green, after all. For the colours in these pictures incorporate a wealth discerned only gradually, just when you might have thought you were finished with the exhibition, that it had nothing more to offer. One thing that struck me was Hareide’s admirable self-dialogue. In the spring of 2000, she exhibited a collection of drawings in Kunstforeningen: subtle works that highlighted the grey tones and physicality of the drawings. The show offered a meditation on the uniqueness of drawing. Now, in her new exhibition, she presents a startling contrast: subtlety is supplanted with boldness, yet also these newer pictures demonstrate delicate nuances and an exuberance of tone and substance. And with that, this “green” exhibition, too, reveals itself as a meditation – a contemplation of the possibilities of a colour, a study of what may transpire when a vivid, clear element of nature is transposed into the domain of art and culturally revisited. Like a photographic negative of the green images, Hareide has hung another an adjacent room with pictures highlighting the colour red. These works serve primarily as a counterpoint to those in the main room – a new tone accenting the first. For the colour green is remarkably green, it has been shown; yet it encompasses so much more. Trond Borgen. Stavanger Aftenblad, 11.11.2004