A trip to the forest of hearts

Kathrine Ærtebjerg's Light/Grass at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts' Exhibition Hall revealed an artist with vision, skilled techniques and poetic flair. The surrealistic canvases were hung displaced in relation to each other, and the room itself was involved to create an installational whole, in which elements from the paintings appeared to break free and spread across the walls.
In Ærtebjerg's images, dark silhouettes and white figures of Yves Tanguy-like form are located in an indefinable, sometimes almost cartoon-like universe, where coloured bubbles create an atmosphere of lightness and cheerfulness. The figures, which are for the most part human, though genderless, are in several of the pictures linked together in playful couples that tend towards the erotic. In other paintings the figures have disappeared, to be replaced by organic, growth-like elements, which fit in well with the thematic charting of an inner landscape that seems to be the artist's overall project.
The painting entitled Hændelse i Hjerteskoven (Incident in the Heart Forest), which was shown at Charlottenborg's Spring Exhibition 2001, shows evidence of the fascination with the wondrous universe which human beings carry within themselves: a vein or an artery runs through the pictorial space here, like a red thread linking the individual forms. Via Ærtebjerg's pictures, the observer is provided with an insight into a microcosmos where phantasms and heart-children emerge shadow-like from their surroundings. It will be exciting to follow the evolution of this parallel universe.

Julie Damgaard Nielsen