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Picture an artist with lots of wild hair and a huge beard that springs out over his duvet jacket. Picture a philosophic, labored mind, a restless individual on his way through the night in a V W Transporter, like a white arrow through Europe, between Abisola, Paris, Copenhagen and Herning. Picture an artist in perpetual motion, alone there on the Autobahn with his telephone and his notebook by the windscreen, between dark highway restaurants and illuminated exits, he writes down ideas, makes appointments, draws sketches and drives, drives, drives. Picture an artist who is always in motion, always on a sales trip, always planning a new futilistic experiment. Picture his art. Picture Kristian Hornsleth.
A cross, a virus, a fucking bastard, that's what he must be, something between the mad scientist, the old fashioned painter of battle scenes, and a money-grubbing messiah - roughly. This particular futilistic alloy shows itself in each and every one of his works. Look, he's moving.
The mad scientist: The painter with the wild beard steps out of his white delivery van with his handwritten notes in one hand. The weather is cold and crystal clear, he unlocks the iron door of the workshop and turns on the inside light, where the canvases are stacked against each other. He is tired but needs to unload and put his gear in order. First the pages from the notebook. They are divided into three categories: Long-term projects, current ideas and urgent matters. Tonight he sets to work on one of the urgent ideas, a sculpture that he finishes drawing, and places some calls to make arrangements for it. He finds a canvas that he throws some pink paint on. But he is neither futilistic nor grandiose, not struck by a great insight nor some divine inspiration, he is simply exhausted, so he stops there, unpacks a few things and drives home to bed.
The next day he is back there again. The paint is dry and the picture mutates, crackles, the painter rearranges, accelerates. He short-circuits his idea and it switches on again. He takes an element from the old brushstrokes, covers them with more layers, draws in the contours, glues on photographs, goes back and forth, back and forth. He begins futilely, with something meaningless, unstructured, chaotic and cultivates the dynamic of chaos, a human power processor with his foot on the accelerator. The experiment is interesting in itself, it is worth continuing to experiment, to repeat, to go on and on. Maybe this is because he is the son of a professor in virology and grew up in the scientific tradition where the only certain knowledge is that which has been examined again and again. Maybe it is simply because he is fascinated by the aesthetics of roundabout methods, by the artistic detour. The virologist's wildly dangerous virus takes the wrong way on purpose and enjoys doing so.
Painter of battle/brawl scenes K: Kristian Hornsleth takes a detour to a design college, where he throws paint on some nude women, plays freak of the day for money, contacts different people in his network to get a business idea started, the cell phone rings again, he comes home, paints, leaves again and mutates. He is a muscleman who presses ideas through by force, does not demonstrate very much sensitivity to obstacles, just tempo, tempo, tempo. He shoots his sawed off shot gun at the canvas, paints imposingly, slaves away, paints over horny porn stars, cuts and tears the canvas.
"You have to shout death so you can feel that you are alive," he says, and shouts as much as he can. The canvas gets more layers. The slogan "rape, kill, burn, steal" across the face of a girl, paints over it, places other hook lines that have their own obvious truth value in the middle of the disorderly aesthetic. He is struggling against recognition, searching for new insights, but does not paint directly philosophical paintings. He reminds one of an old fashioned painter of battle/brawl scenes. The kind of painter who depicted historical events, innovations and stories of important personalities long before there were newspapers and mass media – and marketing for that matter.
"I love the combination of the ultra-commercial and the ultra-philosophical," he declares, he declares incessantly and exhibits the seething surface of this society with its consumer symbols, sex, death, pain and smartness. He is sex, death, pain and smartness, just like all other big consumers, just like all other junkies of media and images of cities. Hornsleth's little, devilish trick is that he not only suffers with us, he analyses the process or portrays us while we are consuming. He places himself in the middle of the most powerful processes of society and accelerates them, becomes a part of them in order to paint them later.
He paints the processes, paints desire for power, money, status, drugs, women and all of the other fun things that the rich have so much of. He paints that strange restraint that always accompanies freedom, paints speed, chaos – and stretches the flesh, the body, satisfaction, aggression out between intensity and meaninglessness. Sometimes with beauty, now and again with disgust, or maybe with a wild rupture to altogether other forms of meaning. In the third millennium the epistemological painter of battle/brawl scenes is portraying the battle of the common people, most of all as a man of action. As if he feels the humming of the highway in his body and paints with it.
My friend the Messiah: Kristian Hornsleth's painting is about to fall into place. He has depicted the movement from random, perhaps futile thoughts, through the semantic cloud chambers of the city and the world, has mimed the strange movement that he and our world constantly contain. He has been on his knees and felt the curbstone of existence, coupled with the opinions and ABCs of marketing consultants. He has started from scratch and has finished countless times. He has mapped the city, very simply, a little bit of existence, and he has done it as imposingly and primitively as he can. But he is still missing the last part before he is able to evangelize in all of the hair salons and living rooms in the world. Now he covers the painting with a rectangular crossbeam of black paint, scratches his signature on it, as it is scratched on everything he touches. The beam covers part of the painting, crosses the view and changes our focus completely. Even though it is not a cross, the beam has its similarities to Jesus' second last stop. The horizontal bar puts the individual in the world, maybe more laughing than suffering, but on display for everyone, and with a lot of body. The beam exhibits the artist, hangs the person in the light, on the outside a morass of chaos and horniness, he remains hanging in the foreground, no matter where everything else is moving to, like a market messiah sentenced to death. Or maybe he is not hanging at all. Maybe he is flying, maybe he is deceiving us and disappears, just when we think we have got him. Maybe he leaves us there, with our mugs facing the canvas and the Hornsleth scratch on our retinas. Surprise! I am coming in your eyes. The picture comes out.
Jacob Fälling, philosopher and journalist based in Copenhagen, 2005
Translated from Danish by Pamela Starbird
This text was published the first time in the book Fuck You Art Lovers Forever,
Kristian von Hornsleth, Futilistic Publishing, Copenhagen 2005.
You can buy the book on www.hornsleth.com
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