The picture's uncertain intention

Kathrine Ærtebjerg's imagery visualises an extraordinary universe located in the borderland between familiar reality and unknown fantasies. Around a central figure located in a natural landscape, or in indefinable space, flowers, insects, animals and birds lie placed in relationship to small figures and geometrical forms, so that the result robs the viewer of all sense of solid ground underfoot. Kathrine Ærtebjerg's drawings and paintings are often presented at exhibitions as installations in association with texts on the walls, or combined with detached and freely hung form elements linking the paintings together, as at the artist's graduation exhibition from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Exit 2002, at the premises of the Copenhagen Art Society. In viewing these paintings, one is continually reminded of childhood imagination and of the magical but often grotesque world of the fairy tale; everything is ambiguous, and consequently many interpretations are possible.

Dream /reality is the significant title of a large figurative oil painting. A young girl lies on a mattress outdoors in a green, open landscape. She is relaxed, with closed eyes, apparently asleep and dreaming. From her stomach grows an almost barren and leafless tree, in which are located a couple of colourful, over-sized butterflies; a lifelike hare sits on one branch, while round about on other branches and sprigs are grouped a number of flat, black silhouettes of anthropoid forms. Three men in miniature format undertake various gymnastic exercises; these are reproduced in minute detail, like line drawings in an exercise manual. The unifying force behind this dream vision is the central mystery of the painting. What is the origin of this remarkable combination and confluence of motifs?
Here it is tempting to turn to the medieval concept of the Tree of Life, or to the complex symbolism of the controversial works of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch, who was active from 1480 until his death in 1516, introduced the fantastic and the demonic to painting through, amongst other things, inversions of scale, so that human beings became small, animals and plants huge. He also combined disparate elements in his teeming, visionary tales. However, a significant influence from the later explorations by the surrealists of the irrational and the subconscious is also visible in Kathrine Ærtebjerg's work.

The juxtaposition of the miniature and the gigantic – two sizes between which children routinely switch in their play – is probably in the final analysis a question of finding principles around which to organise reality. In the works of Kathrine Ærtebjerg, these dimensions of scale surround a young girl, whom we can follow from picture to picture almost like the principal character in a serial. The girl is nameless, at times identified as ”I”, but more often just as ”she”, as in the painting entitled She had often been told that she was a flower. She did not feel like one. ”She” functions as the hub of the story told by the individual paintings; she is the one who calls forth the fantasies, the questions and the many speculative reflections on life engaged in by this figure, who is no longer a child, but is not an adult, either. The title She could not sleep is a statement from the private sphere; nonetheless, the painting of a girl who cannot sleep does not belong to the confessional genre, as Kathrine Ærtebjerg has with humorous skill translated this banal condition into the fantastic and symbolic world of fiction, where it acquires a peculiar distance. ”She” is a literary construction, an alter ego for the artist, whose use of the pubescent girl also establishes metamorphosis as a common theme of the works, together with the use of scale distortion.

Metamorphosis is not merely transformation from one condition to another through a progressive process, but also involves a radical change of form. One of the most famous literary examples is provided by the story of Apollo and Daphne in Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which the nymph Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree to escape the attentions of Apollo. In the world of metamorphosis it is not unthinkable to pass from one form to another, and often such metamorphosis acts as the escape route of the imagination. Various metamorphoses occur in the work of Kathrine Ærtebjerg, emphasising the sensation of a magical dream world. Through her imagination, she envisages a parallel world in which recollections operate. It may be the dreamland of her childhood, in which details and events combine before fading into distant memories. Distance and abstraction also manifest themselves in the works in a concrete sense through the technical flatness which characterises even the greatest paintings.

The headline ”The picture's uncertain intention” derives from the last line of a poem by Kathrine Ærtebjerg. By linking texts with pictures, she explores the possibilities and directions that arise when two different forms of expression are juxtaposed. The titles thereby also acquire a special significance, and new elements are added to the images in the exhibition, when the artist associates them with short textual statements. The drawings, she has said, arise directly, without major considerations, but in the working process involved in the creation of a painting, a motif may be transferred from a drawing and reused. The process resembles the essence of metamorphosis itself: Kathrine Ærtebjerg balances the free play of intuition upon a knife edge, thereby allowing a flow of uncontrolled imagery to arise in the paintings, which are then subjected to the aesthetics of beauty and perfection that contribute such a high degree of magic, and insight into the world of fantasy, to her paintings.

Kathrine Ærtebjerg, however, is not alone in exploring such a world. A large group of young, mainly female, artists have at the dawn of the new century evinced a great fascination with colourful stories, in which both innocence and horror find expression in artificial landscapes, utopian towns or bizarre interiors. The everyday realism which in many ways characterised the works of the 1990s has now been abandoned in favour of the augmented sense of reality provided by the world of the imagination. Imagination and intuition are given free rein in this new Fantasy Painting, among which the works of Kathrine Ærtebjerg, in particular, express themselves with beautiful consistency.

By Ann Lumbye Sørensen