HANS PETTER BLAD

WRITER, POET, FILMMAKER

Writer, poet, filmmaker… Hans Petter Blad is all of that, and also a friend of painters, a fan of jazz and art from Monk to Munch, and an acute observer of every nook and cranny in his native Oslo: he has walked all its streets. His work is an opus written in rhymes and rhythms, and cardiac rhythms especially, because beneath the surface of his work lies rage: the rage to create. To observe. To listen. To read. Since his first feature-film — “Hodiak”, shot in the early Nineties, launched a new Norwegian wave — and also in his many novels and plays, Blad has never ceased swaying between black and white: the fragile equilibrium of humans in search of identity. Hans Petter Blad takes a chisel to the chiaroscuro of souls. Outwardly humorous and poetic, but deep down, icy and opaque. Like a frosted version of French writer Olivier Cadiot. Every text he writes is a proposal. An invitation to go on a journey. An extension to the domain of struggle beneath the midnight sun. At the age of 54 he has traversed every art form in the world, and his Rimbaud-like accents have taken him to numerous continents, but with a slight preference for the old one and particularly its Paris-the-City-of-Light. It is the city of all things possible for this artist from the North: this explorer of vagabond moods is sculpting his own creations like some tipsy onlooker drifting with the currents of his own sensibility.

With an ear permanently screwed to the hearts of the living, Hans Petter Blad is a hunter: he hunts poetic breaths, and as a younger man his dreams were of Albert Camus and “The Rebel”. For this collaboration with the ONJ he has sifted through all his poetry collections, from “Bibliothèque” (2008) and “Marbre” (2010), to “Musée” (2014) and “Clair-obscur” (2016). His selection contains fragments of life more realist than surrealist, fragments where the dialogue between Man and Nature takes place over a good verse, and words become the final cure for all ills.