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[April 30th 2003]
Interview + pictures
Søren Martinsen
Interview with Søren Martinsen
The hanging resembles a narrative sequence, a journey,
a road that twists its way through the empty landscape, disappearing
off into the horizon – like watching the pulse crossing a screen
at a hospital slowly become a flat line as the heart stops beating.
It starts in mystical, fantasy landscapes: the road through the
woods (“forest path”), an abandoned house (“mushroom
neighbours”) and a line from a good-night song (“The Sun
is So Red”) perhaps from the lost land of childhood, and finally
“Birch near the Agriculture University”, which after a
closer look proved full of eyes.
Only one image is a portrait of a person, and it is placed midway
between the two rooms, a paper construction of a man, nervously
sweating, his back to the viewer, glancing back over his shoulder
directly at us, looking like the condensed version of a road movie.
Through landscapes and urban corners, psychedelic and industrial,
some in a ‘70s comic book style – we see the world as
though we were alone in it and on LSD.
“Horisont” (“Horizon”) is the last image in
the series, and with its simple form it is both the most closed
and the most open piece in the exhibition. “Ingen veje (pulslinje)”
(“No way (pulse line)”) enters the picture, while a mystical
light attracts the eye to a diffused gash.
Interview and photo: Melou Vanggaard.
Søren Martinsen
(f. 1966) was trained at Goldsmiths' College, University of London
(94) and the Royal Danish Academy of Art (95).
He’s exhibited extensively both in Denmark and abroad over
the last ten years and has produced a wealth of video work as well.
Søren Martinsen has just been appointed artistic director
of Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen.
Søren Martinsen
P.O.V. - Point Of View
3 April – 3 May
Galerie Asbæk - Undergrunden
Bredgade 20, 1260 Copenhagen K
Mon-Fri 11-18, Sat 11-16
Tel. +45 33 15 40 04
fax +45 33 13 16 10
galerie@asbaek.dk
www.asbaek.dk
 
Søren Martinsen: Skovsti
(Forest Path), acrylic/oil on canvas, 120x150, 2003
Søren Martinsen: Solen er så rød mor
(The Sun is so Red, Mom), acrylic/oil on canvas, 97x145, 2003
What is this world that you create your pieces in?
It’s a world of images that come primarily from my own
psyche, but are also very influenced by filmic narrative and my
work with video and photography. It’s a world of images that
conjure up different moods in the room, psychological states that
occupy my work.
Is it an interpretation of reality?
My photographic work is rooted in concrete reality, but my paintings
are a little more free. In this work I use painting very much as
a media that can express fantasy and visual ideas that come from
inside of yourself and don’t have to have a direct relationship
with the physical world. But there are also paintings that portray
the concrete, like the birch trees by the Agriculture University
or the picture of the road trip through the American landscape.
Your exhibition is made up of paintings and drawings that all
rely on narrative structure. Do you think cinematically when you
paint?
All this work represents a period of about 2 years, so there
are various impulses in it, but I’ve been surprised how easy
it was to construct a narrative sequence when I was hanging the
work. I had hoped for something like that, but it wasn’t planned.
But it’s a very loose narrative, where the filmic is most readily
apparent in the road movie-like landscapes, but also in the way
that the images “clip” into each other in different directions
and ways; wide angle, total, half shot and close up, like in a film.
 
Søren Martinsen:
Birke ved Landbohøjskolen (Birch near the Agriculture
University), acrylic/oil on canvas, 97x130, 2003
Søren Martinsen: Dangerous territory, acrylic/oil
on canvas, 150x185cm, 2001
What’s your painting method, is it different from your work
with photo and film?
Video is a media that can quickly become bloody difficult and
expensive. Much of the time you’re dependent upon financial support.
It’s easier to do a painting. It’s less demanding because
it can be worked on whenever, though the more you work on it, the
harder it gets; even though it’s just sitting there on the easel
it’s still psychologically draining, I think. You really have
to concentrate; it’s a lot like playing chess.
What fascinates you? Is fear compelling?
Many people say that they find my images a little scary or dark.
And that’s part of my “Point of View”, as in the name
of the show. But it isn’t a threatening or violent world that
I work with, it’s more of an underlying sense of something wrong,
like in a dream when there is something wrong and you can’t put
your finger on it. But for the most part I’m fascinated by a
sense of heavy emptiness that seems to hang over the pictures, and
it’s maybe that that seems both attractive and unsettling about
my work. It’s true that a kind of “alone in the world”
atmosphere can suggest death or a transitory mood. “Memento mori”
is an element in my work.
 
Søren Martinsen: Farligt Landskab
(Dangerous Landscape), acrylic/oil on canvas, 40x40 cm, 2002
Søren Martinsen: Ghost town, acrylic/oil on canvas,
50x60, 2003
Your pictures seem abandoned, deserted, but full of weight, patterns,
arabesques and atmosphere. Is it the past, or traces that have been
left behind, that are slowly receding?
Well, there aren’t many living people in my pictures, as
you were saying, but I’m very interested in architecture and
the traces left behind by peoples lives and their travels. Not traces
like the boring, classical silence of ruins, but more things left
behind after an intense use, like the tent chaos after Roskilde
music festival or graffiti in Christiania, or the wreckage of the
slums.
Is there a hidden message “between the lines”?
If there’s a message that isn’t immediately readable
in my work, it would be the political. The political thinking I
do as I watch the society around me develop, the growing violence
and chaos in the world. It gives me a feeling of frustration which
I try to communicate through my pictures – especially the societal
critique of the psychedelic paintings that portray nightmare visions
of late-capitalism’s polluted over-consumption hell. But in
the “quieter” pieces there is also a kind of sorrow brought
on by naïve or vanished utopian ideas, like when in my video
“Smilende Sussi” (Smiling Sussi) I explore a sad old ghost
house that was once a collective, full of life, with guitar playing
young Marxists who believed in the future.
 
Søren Martinsen:
Skorstene (Smokestacks), acrylic/oil on canvas, 50x60 cm,
2003
Søren Martinsen: Rhinen (The Rhine), acrylic/oil
on canvas, 100x125 cm, 2002
Your pictures seem almost to be in a time warp, there are always
new rooms, no details coming into view. They seem like they were
created as part of a process in which time was unimportant.
Yes, in the same way that time is abstract in a dream. Time
is elastic. You can also find this same feeling of time being irrelevant
in some forms of music or psychedelic film; it’s the space
that’s important. And there are always new rooms to explore,
like in a labyrinth.
What’s the next thing we’ll see from you?
Maybe some more video. But it would have to be something simple
that I can produce myself with the help of a few friends. In that
way I’m a bit of a chameleon, I switch between media, but I
do it because I think it’s fun, and the various art forms I
work in are for me parts of the whole…
 
Søren Martinsen:
Skull City, mix media on paper, 55x65cm, 2003
Søren Martinsen: Horisont (Horizon), acrylic/oil
on canvas, 97x97 cm, 2003
More...
Søren
Martinsens cv på SparwasserHQ
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