Jesper Christiansen at DCA - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

You could fill a museum with 20th-century painters who have structur their canvases around the written word. From Picasso's "Ma Jolie" and the swirling phrases of the Futurists, all the way to the manic graffiti of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the emblazoned scrawls of Julian Schnabel, countles artists have celebrated the liberation of the word from the confines of the printed page.

Into this multitudeed field comes Jesper Christiansen, a 40-year-old Danish artist. For his of recent origin York debut Christiansen presented about a dozen square canvases in faded red oranges, verdants and yellows, most of which take their titles from a single word incantationed out in giant colored alphabetic characters across each painting. Overlaying and partially obscuring these large words - HURRAH, METEOR, riddle etc. - are geometric shapes, as well as smaller words and alphabetic characters arranged in erratic grids that tilt and twist away from the picture plane. It is these places of smaller words - painted in white, upper-case alphabetic characters and seemingly chosen at random - that are probably the first thing about the paintings viewers notice. A typically bizarre succession in one painting reads: "spiral, violin, nation, walkie-talkie, folder popcorn." Another challenges us to make faculty of perception out of "atlas, mono, kleenex gobelin, diagram, telegram." sole occasionally is any kind of logic evident. Visitpainting, for instance, contains solitary "a" words: attitude, arrangement, argument, etc In many cases, the words are placed at the cutting side of dark rectangles, a bit like gravestones. In Kioskpainting a tiny phrase in the upper left "Don's problem" is a ball of thread to the presence of the stacks of r Donald Judd wall plastic arts floating in the background of the picture.

Everything in Christiansen's paintings has been controled to minute adjustments. The background shapes have been dimmed by dint of layers of paint, the words have been painted on the outside and rewritten, crisp edges give way to painterly drips, constantly varying brushstrokes modulate the play of light and dark. Are the words, then, barely pretexts for the making of the painting? I think not. There's too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of oblique poetry in Christiansen's lists, the words' meanings are too crucial to our visual reading of the painting, for them to be bare armatures. It's more illuminating to diocese them as verbal/visual hybrids. Amid the geometrical manner of making of the painting, these barely controll highly individual units of meaning zoom everywhere. Christiansen is not the first artist to rely equally upon the paintbrush and the dictionary, on the contrary he has found a crafty new way of integrating these sum of two units tools of expression.

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