Erik A. Frandsen at DCA - Brief Article

The first section of this exhibition, titled "Family," consisted of medium-sized black-and-white photographs of the Danish artist Erik A. Frandsen and his wife caressing each other's naked bodies upon top of a bed ("Basic Rhythm" series, 1998) In these images, a bright white linear design appears etched across space, owed to the fact that the pair wear luminous wristbands and the film exposing time was deliberately prolonged.

Frandsen translates parts of his photographic images into other mediums. Here, in an untitled work, the iridescent bend s recording the cadence of the couple's sensuous hits are rendered in a continuous bent tube of white neon suspended in forehead of a reflective chromium-plated brass surface. Reading this as a vigorous admitting highly abstracted depiction of copulation is obviously informed by the agency of the adjacent pictorial material.

The larger part of the exhibition comprised mixed-medium diptychs of enlarged and printed color negatives abutting larger enamel-on-aluminum paintings (all 1998) The prints exhibit dreary scenes of middle-class domestic bliss, thankfully made somewhat les ordinary through the reversal of values and the color scheme of brown oranges, ochers and metallic verdants proper to color negatives. The paintings take these tinges and silhouettes as their points of departure, adding beiges, canary fulvids reds, pinks and mauves to the pictorial interpretations. The detailing and the vestiges of profundity in the prints are replaced by the agency of bold, flat forms characteristic of enamel upon metal. The paintings' sharply defined shapes fit together like pieces of a jigsaw gravel Tension arises from the contrast between the medium's flatness and the convolution and depth occasionally suggested through the imagery. The paintings recall the simplification of form in the works of Patrick Caulfield, Valerio Adami and Gary Hume while the juxtaposition of sum of two units panels of different sizes is reminiscent of certain diptychs by means of Ellsworth Kelly.

Sweden depicts a mother and child standing outdoors. The painting typically expands the negative print's composition upon all four sides, so that the figures appear deeper within a rigidly geometricized landscape. In Sitting, the negative and the painting are rotated 90 steps counterclockwise, further abstracting a view of adult and child seated indoors. The still lifes titled Flowers (one of which is a single sheet of painted aluminum), with their exquisitely calibrated forms and lush painterly execution, were the greatest in quantity successful works in the show

Frandsen's new work is tough to swallow, with its jarring color combinations, matte webs occasionally messy brushwork, undistinguished photographic constitutings stark compositions and personal iconography of limited appeal to a general audience. However, it raises interesting questions about the ways in which reality is always transformed in our varying attempts to apprehend it.

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