Morten Buch
Nuovo
05 Apr – 25 May 2024
What if an identifiable object, one familiar to us, were to appear before us in an unusual, strange, even disturbing fashion? It is on this ambiguity that Morten Buch’s work rests, and it is one of the elements that most profoundly separates his art from a linguistic structure, as his intention is to give concreteness to something that cannot be expressed verbally. An example of this practice comes precisely from his most recent works, exhibited for the first time on the occasion of his new exhibition Nuovo at Galleri Susanne Ottesen in Copenhagen.
To think of linguistics, and of language as a system of possibilities, is almost natural when one observes the production of Morten Buch. A champion of forms that, as has been observed, combines the coldness of Danish expressionism with the everyday repertoire of American pop art and the simplicity typical of minimalism. A production that, for the past fifteen years or so, has taken on a precise direction: Morten Buch’s art abounds with still lifes filled with subjects familiar to all. No exoticism, no affectation, no impudence, just the objects that anyone would find at home. Jars, vases, glasses, flowers, pears, bottles, shoes, plants, books, bells, light bulbs, tables, sculptures, aubergines, baskets, stones, curtains, brushes, spoons, lemons, plungers, ikebana, socks, stools, tablecloths, palms, blankets, containers, knives, notebooks, lamps, chairs. At times manifesting themselves as ordinary, easily recognisable presences, at other times more challenging, presenting themselves to the eyes of the beholder with forms deviating from common perception.
The objects in Buch’s still lifes take the path of abstraction and act essentially like the forms of language. The Danish artist imagines his still lifes as amalgams of forms: for this reason, Buch has worked with the most diverse media, from drawing to painting, passing through sculpture, always with an experimental attitude, and always considering the various expressions as moments of transition from one to the other: sometimes paintings are ideas from which sculptures might arise, while at other times, on the contrary, sculptures are bases from which paintings come to be, and so on, opening up the widest possible horizon of experiences to the viewer. In recent years he has taken up marble -using the material in various forms, from a table – a two-dimensional structure on which the artist re-proposes the tools typical of his paintings to a surface to be painted directly onto and later carved and filled with resin – in other instances, the marble lends itself to three-dimensional sculptures, provoking the observer, challenging them to try to recognise the form.
During a period of residence in Pietrasanta in Italy, Morten Buch created a series of bronze sculptures depicting his prevailing motifs and tree trunks, some clearly defined, others less so. The idea to experiment with this motif came to the artist not from observing nature, as one might perhaps superficially imagine, but from classical art. Examples abound: Satirello o l’Ercole fanciullo in Galleria Borghese, Satiro a riposo in the Musei Capitolini, Ganimede, Apollo appoggiato al tronco or the Venere de’ Medici in the Uffizi. All of them characters leaning on a trunk. When we walk around museums and see the bodies of the heroes and gods of mythology, we rarely pay attention to the tree trunk supporting them, as all of our attention is centered on the character: and yet the trunk, this often neglected element plays a fundamental role, because it acts as a base, creates balance in the composition, and provides elements to identify the protagonist (in the Ganimede of the Uffizi, the glances exchanged between Ganymede and the eagle would be impossible without the trunk upon which the eagle rests, in the Apollino de’ Medici the quiver of the god of poetry, his iconographic attribute, is attached to the trunk, and so forth). Morten Buch’s conceptual operation consists, primarily, in isolating the trunk, giving it back its dignity, and then to present it, not without a certain irony, in a form that opens the space of possibility.
At the basis of Buch’s research we seem to find the art of Jasper Johns (specifically the early Johns, with brushes and light bulbs), and his attention to the most ordinary of objects, the idea that art should commence with ‘things that the mind already knows’, his antagonistic attitude toward the opposition between the abstract and the figurative, his insistence on the gap between the object and its representation. How can a living element disrupt the stillness of the work of art without there being any connection based on predefined rules (herein lies perhaps the main difference between a work of art and a linguistic system, no matter the number of shared characteristics), in much the same way an unusual form can affect the memory and sensations of the beholder. That is why the bizarre, the silly, even the erroneous are recurring conditions in Buch’s works.
“For me,” Buch confesses, “it’s about creating a space in which the viewer might feel free, that’s my goal”. The ‘strange familiarity’ of his works, an oxymoron coined to define the sense of disturbance that pervades his works, works towards this goal, demanding robust discipline and equally clear precision. Precision understood not in the classical sense, known since the seventeenth-century glossary of the arts, i.e. as the highest degree of fidelity between representation and model, but rather as a well-organised combination of elements both philosophically and physically. This is the key to the best connection to the viewer’s experience of Morten Buch’s work, to allow the viewer to traverse the forms and move through Buch’s universe by humouring them and prodding their imagination.
Text by Federico Giannini, editor-in-chief of Finestre sull’Arte, translated from Italian by Rasmus L. Bojesen