The show “Impressionisms” reintroduces the tradition of French landscape painting from the late 18th century and into the present by employing literal methods of impressions and marks of pigment from fresh wildflowers gathered in the urban space of Copenhagen and acetone printing on birch plywood panels.
French Impressionist landscape paintings namely of flower fields act as a prospect of the very place they were conceived and not only address the environmental awareness of the time but likewise, embrace the political and aesthetic gaze constituted in which the minimal impression and fleeting images were congratulated in contrast to the predecessor of fixed and representational painterly practices.
These ephemeral images represent not only a shifted turn in art history but also a time when photography and various new industrial innovations were part of changing the narrative arts representation and literal role into a merely abstracted and sensible experience embraced by all artistic fields across the Western art world, among other; composers, the arts and crafts movement and the literary circles.
More than a decade later, as technological and industrial innovations continue to evolve rapidly within an interconnected global context, the prevalence of fleeting images persists and new techniques may arise from this constantly changing physical and digital environment.
An environment that both globally and locally is confronted with an urgent crisis of a decreasing biodiversity, destruction of landscapes in favour of big agriculture and an increasingly evolving city where local communities are threatened and where real estate industries defines the politics of land and the fields that they occupy. To encompass and emphasise this notion and the definition of fields and categorisation of land, various speculative grid-like figurations are transferred onto the panels with acetone, a formerly by-product material used as a solvent, to emphasise the territorial qualities and the similar speculative notion of maps, fields and land.
The gathering of flowers takes place from newly established flower meadows in Copenhagen initiated by the municipality in which new seed mixtures at 11 different locations are intended to create food and shelter for insects and birds as part of a new plan to enrich local biodiversity.
The collected flowers are then stamped onto the panel for their pigment to absorb into the plywood and thus create and underline the geographical mark from where they were gathered and similarly an abstraction of that very field.
The series of 11 panels seeks to function as a revised flower field painting in which the flowers aren’t painted but rather, used for their pigment. The work intends to represent that very field, following the trajectories and traditions of Land art where the land or field as a place, concept and philosophical notion is represented in various ways as a means; to understand, contemplate and partake in our common fleeing environment.
— Theodor Nymark
at AAAA Nordhavn, Copenhagen
until September 18, 2024