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An approach to the paintings of Kaspar Bonnén
By Camilla Jalving, 2006
Kaspar Bonnén paints spaces. That could be the introductory statement; brief, but precise and to the point. For since the middle of the 1990s, the visual artist and writer Kaspar Bonnén, b.1968, has concerned himself with spaces, both in his poetry and, in particular, in his visual art, which besides painting also includes sculpture and photography. It is against the background of this artistic practice that Bonnén now stands as one of the most significant figures in the renewal of Danish painting which took place in the 1990s, related in both chronological, stylistic and conceptual terms with other, younger, Danish artists such as John Kørner and Tal R, with whom he shares an interest in figurative, colourful and narrative painting and in exhibiting paintings in more installational contexts. One example of such an exhibition was Sovende politik (Sleeping Politics) at Albertslund Town Hall in 1999, when Bonnén furnished the foyer with an unmade bed, like the rudimentary shelter of a homeless person, as well as a number of banners bearing the municipality's own slogan-like statements on visions of the good life in Albertslund. We can also see this approach in Bonnén's current exhibition There is a Path at Galleri Christina Wilson (January 20. – March 4. 2006), in which the actual gallery walls have been transformed into a total installation of painted walls, paintings, photographs, texts and sculptures; a warm, glowing cave which engulfs the visitor so completely that you are no longer in an art gallery in one of Copenhagen's former industrial districts but rather in the soft, glowing interior of the mountain, in the innermost space of all – perhaps inside Kaspar Bonnén himself.
Nonetheless, this business of Bonnén painting spaces is really not such a complicated affair. For although he paints spaces, this involves not just one, but many different kinds of space; spaces which overlap and merge, and which together create a visual conglomerate, a dense deposit of spatialities and visibilities and synchronicities, all right there on the flat canvas. As Bonnén writes in his poetry collection Inventarium from 2001: "The space is the possibility of presence" which can mean many things, but at any rate means that as soon as there is one, there is the possibility of the presence of another. And as soon as there is one, that one is penetrated by a second, a third and a fourth … at any rate for Bonnén.
A typological categorisation of these many spaces might look like this: first and foremost there is the physical space, and then there is the abstract, remembered, and experienced space. For Bonnén, the physical space is the private space. Most of his paintings are based on photographs from his own home. These might include a kitchen with a sink, some washing-up and a few scattered objects, such as in the work Hjem igen (4 farver krydser hinanden i et rum) (Home Again: four colours interwoven in a space) from 2004, in which this familiar and really rather trivial motif makes a quite extravagant appearance in yellow and pink on the smooth-painted canvas, as a matter-of-fact yet poetic celebration of the daily routine with its washing-up liquid and cheese grater, in the role of the leading dramatis personae of everyday life. This is how it looks, home; neither better nor worse, but precisely like this. It might also be a bedroom, as in Hjem igen (drøm) (Home again (dream)), also from 2004, in which the unmade bed in the foreground forms a specific emblem of the intimacy of private life and the longing for another person which seems to form the work's slightly melancholy undertone. The home, as Bonnén writes in his poem Architecture in the book of the same name, is the setting of love. These are the spaces in which it lives; in the sheets, or the chairs that she or he has sat on; or in the living room, which Bonnén paints again and again. The lounge or dining room with the long table and the chairs around it; on the table are coffee mugs, tea pots, vases: traces of a life lived. His own life, we must presume, which gives the paintings a strongly personal air, as though you were invited home to the artist, into the warmth, into his entirely private domain.
With this focus on private life, Bonnén seems to expose part of his soul; he reveals it via his almost stubborn insistence on the inner as his idiom and on the artist's right to fragility – in powerful contrast to the masculine clichés of the artist and his art as heroic, potent and aggressively expressive. Bonnén is not expressive as such; what he is, is intense, in his specific conjuring forth of the banal, the trivial, the piles of washing up and the ordinariness of the daily routine.
Nonetheless, this is not the whole history. For although Bonnén paints his own home, this motif extends beyond the boundaries of home as such. The objects he portrays - mass-produced classics such as PH lamps and Arne Jacobsen chairs - have for example such an ordinary character that they could be found in many people's homes, which is why his designs are just as much culturally coded icons of the daily routine as they are intimate reports from the artist's own private life. This means that Bonnén's works operate just as much in the field between the private and the public, the intimate and the common, as they occupy the one state or the other. They play out the private sphere in the public arena, in order thereby to insist, not on its private character, but rather on its generality.
For Bonnén, this interest in the space as a purely formal and perceptual matter began as an exploration of how squares, such as those the painter Josef Albers created in the 1950s, could connect with lines, and thereby give the impression of spatiality. This exploration is expressed at its clearest when Bonnén paints more abstract spaces over the concrete kitchens, bedrooms and dining rooms: simple square forms with diagonal lines extending from the corners, such as in the painting Hjem igen (Et rum i et andet) (Home Again (one space within another)) from 2004, in which the living-room is viewed through a stylised perspective frame. Or when, as in Untitled, 2005, he reduces the space to abstract colour fields which create vanishing points extending out of the space, thereby indicating the possibility of other spaces; worlds other than the one portrayed within the frame of the painting.
For the most part the rooms are empty, as though their residents have suddenly abandoned them; as though you have arrived too late and they have all left for work, or gone to bed with the washing-up stacked in the sink. As there are no people present, you have to add them yourself; create for yourself the life that normally fills these rooms. The painting thus more often becomes a stage for the observer's own stories than a story in itself; more a screen for our own performances than for those of the artist.
In other paintings, however, such as the two untitled works from 2005 exhibited in the current installation at Galleri Christina Wilson, the artist's stories encroach in other ways. Via a layer of painted figures, dream imagery and fragments of memories indicate a space other than the purely physical. One could call it a dreamed, imagined or remembered space; at any rate, it is an imaginary space, of the kind that is expressed in the paintings' many architectural overlays. It might be a door or a window frame which creates an architectural structure on top of that which already exists, as though there were not just one space, but many. Bonnén has explained these motifs and architectural overlays with the idea that in one's own space there are often other spaces simultaneously present. As he wrote in the article Jeg vil være rum (I want to be space) from 2004: "Using simple forms, I try to create the illusion of spaces and a multiplicity of ways in which they can manifest themselves. In this way the paintings become a cross-section of, or an insight into, a mental process, or a description of the many possible spatial constitutions, such as when you sit in a room reading a text and are filled with the images of the story. At the same time, you might be thinking of your partner or about something you forgot to do today. Many different spaces and experiences pulse within the brain as electrical reverberations."
When Bonnén paints the remembered space, he also paints that which is experienced, i.e. the sensory perception of the space in which the remembered occurs. This is at any rate the effect the paintings produce when you stand before them as an observer and try to enter their floating, concentrated spatiality. Entering them takes time, for whether the painting is the smooth type with the paint added in thin layers, or the more pastose variety, dominated by the exaggerated tactility of the brushstrokes, neither the space nor the perspective is immediately readable. And this is not just because Bonnén has long since abandoned the classic central perspective with its stringent spatial constructions, but also because the background and the foreground of the pictures often overlap; indeed, the distinction sometimes dissolves, as in the pastose paintings. It is at any rate difficult to determine what lies in the background and in the foreground of the pictures. At first glance they can thus seem almost entirely abstract, like shimmering colours – more of a motif in dissolution than creation. When you have gazed for a sufficiently long time, however, the spaces portrayed acquire depth, and the individual objects take on shape and form. Observing Bonnén's paintings thus takes time. Indeed, it almost seems as though time and the passage of time are painted into the paintings, inasmuch as they resist immediate readability. One is thus tempted to claim that Bonnén does not portray a space as a concrete or measurable place, but rather as a chronological and bodily experience. Hence the plurality, and hence the many spaces; because these are spaces as they are both sensed, lived, experienced, remembered and revisited; because these, and the displacements between them, are what he paints.
Consequently, when we regard Bonnén's work, we are not merely in the artist’s home; not just in the living-room as a physical space, but also as a lived space: the living-room as condition. In this respect his works are not just about the immediate and intimate, about the banal poetic aspects of the daily routine which reveal themselves between the coffee grounds and the vases that need fresh water; they are also about the observer's perceptions, and about the fundamental challenge that lies in turning a multidimensional surface into a three-dimensional space. About how to communicate a bodily experience, and how to give visual form to a recollection. All of which extends beyond the personal context and ensures that his painting, despite the private references, is never hermetically closed in upon itself, never so personal that it does not also concern you as a person. In this sense, while he is painting his own private spaces, he is also painting yours.
Literature:
Kaspar Bonnén, Inventarium, Borgens Forlag 2001
Kaspar Kaum Bonnén, ’Jeg vil være rum’, in: Passepartout, no. 23, vol. 12, 2004
Bonnén, Apartment, Borgens Forlag 2005
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