Understand the Silence and There It Is
It’s all in the detail, and into Morten Andersen’s graphic universe
The art of Morten Andersen is loud, and you can’t just walk past its calls. The pieces beckon for your attention and presence. They insist on presence and invite you into a richness of detail that is deep and opens up multiple dimensions.
Morten Andersen’s large canvases offer themselves to you and expand their many layers, as a theatre stage would with foreground, middle ground and background. The stage is constantly changing, the figures moving, with actions occurring in the foreground or background or just in between.
The scenes open up and details bustle forwards, exploding the whole and making the details everything, creating an intense presence.
All the details are a deeper exploration of the artist himself and the routes he examines. The artist’s meticulousness and sense for details, which itself is so time consuming, also provides a response to the superficiality and speed of contemporary life that never quite reaches into the detail and thereby loses the overview of the whole.
The works of art contain a strong and uncut energy known from street art’s swift tools of communication, and the abstract in Morten Andersen’s works moves into what is called urban abstract expressionist art. Different from street art’s unrestrained expression, this is of a newer generation and thus an evolution of earlier street art and urban expressions, even if the forces in Morten Andersen’s pieces have similarly been set free, are expressive, and too evoke emotions through their color bolts.
Juan Gris, (1887–1927, one of the fathers of Cubism) once said, “There are no shapes more expansive than the circle, or more concentrated than the triangle”.
This is perhaps contrary to what one might generally think about shapes, as the circle could be seen as the most closed shape and the angles of the triangle may feel incomplete.
A lot of geometry is in play in Morten Andersen’s works, but here it is other than, or, to be more precise, more than, mathematics. Both the circle and triangle are something other than their first semblance. The order of mathematics is splintered and the angular and round shapes are simultaneously expanding and very concentrated, as this is not about making the shapes become something recognizable, or as he says, “It isn’t meant to look like anything”, and continues, “I mean, a rectangle is a rectangle but the piece doesn’t refer to anything we know of”.
Morten Andersen’s art doesn’t look like anything, it just is. It represents itself. It is a provocation and a challenge for the audience.
The human brain will seek patterns and shapes it (re)cognizes and thereby assume some control of what the piece is communicating. So while some see outer space in the pieces, other perhaps see flying in to land above a metropolis at night, as if Tokyo was high on coke. But in Morten Andersen’s pieces a decided loss of control takes place, or perhaps more precisely, control is set free.
The viewer is not guided anywhere, but rather the viewer’s own curiosity leads the viewer around all the corners, into the recesses, out into the light and deep into the shadows.
Morten Andersen’s pieces demand time and are like stop blocks in busy lives that see only surfaces. The artworks call to the viewer, who must set aside time to open their eyes to the life hidden amongst all the small details, ranging from pixels to geometric shapes that one can get utterly lost in, and in that space discovering that all is in the detail.
It is about understanding the silence, exactly where it can be heard, experienced, and felt.
The titles of Morten Andersen’s pieces, such as “Come Back Transformed”, “They Engineered Us”, “Something Once Human”, open up entire universes of meaning without actually revealing anything. The title expands the surface of the canvas. The title becomes a detail that contains the entity.
“Percussion of the Cosmos” is the title of one work. For Morten Andersen the composition of a piece is, as with music and sounds and as in a recording studio, all about tuning in so the range of frequencies and buttons on the mixer are entirely clear. It is about understanding the silence, right there in all the shapes, colors, and sounds, and in that which lies within them. It is a quest towards the inside of silence, like a harmony. In the world and in our selves.
In his latest pieces Morten Andersen has allowed several organics shapes into his otherwise very tight universe. With their almost analogue organic brushstrokes, often using the large brush, they visually expand the digital and sharpen the richness of detail in the pieces.
Constantly shifted through repetitions, the detail contains the whole, as though everything were dispersed through a diamond, splitting out all the colors in the spectrum of a prism.
Like a glimpse of an explosion, the release of a restrained and trapped pressure.
And all the shapes and colors still reverberate, as if the piece despite its tightness and harmony were yet incomplete.
The explosion has removed the center. It has shifted and moved into the viewer. Into the individual. All is split into atoms. The pieces become large, open portals that open in, and out, into the unknown.
This is the provocation and it is a decided loss of control that takes place. But just here an enormous freedom occurs. A freedom that releases an abundance of anxiety, but also an abundance of power and energy.
Morten Andersen’s pieces create images inside your head, if only you dare to let them: let go of control and let art take over. That is Understand the silence and there it is.
~ Troels Laursen
Facts:
Morten Andersen (1976-), born in Aalborg, Denmark.
www.m-andersen.com
Troels Laursen (1965-), theologist and art critic.
Since 2014 a Member of AICA Danmark, part of AICA International, Association Internationale des Critiques d’art, established in 1950.
www.troelslaursen.dk
