Introduction to Blind Houses
Written by Palle Ejler Juul Holm
I have written a couple of artist monographs, contributed texts for the artist group Grunhorse and for various individual artists, and for many years worked as an art critic for the annual publication Dansk Kunst and the magazine North Art Magazine. In other words, I am well seasoned.
Yet I have never found it so difficult to write an introduction to a body of work as I have here.
Most people would probably consider that a dubious compliment. They would be mistaken.
What it means is that the work continues to reveal qualities that are not apparent at first glance. It does not bloom for everyone immediately. It rewards patience and contemplation.
For some time now, the artist has worked with determined focus on a series of paintings whose principal motif is a group of abandoned houses located within the military training grounds near Oksbøl and Vejers Strand, north of Skallingen in southwestern Jutland.
The series began with the very first painting in 2011, a work titled South Beach. It is a fascinating and enigmatic painting: dark, nocturnal, and focused on the blackness beneath the surface.
It is as though the artist, or something within the artist, has emerged from the water like the first prehistoric fish and passed by the viewer.
The central motif of the series is the Blind Houses themselves. In a peculiar way they seem alive, filled with an incomprehensible presence that almost appears to be observing us.
Everything superfluous has been removed from their depiction. Trees, bushes and other vegetation growing beside or through the buildings have been omitted from the paintings.
What matters are the houses themselves. They stare back at us. They possess a life of their own, but may also, individually, be incarnations of the artist. A good deal of the self-illuminating primordial darkness present in South Beach has clearly been carried over into these houses.
Then again, it would probably be a mistake to regard them merely as psychological self-portraits.
The artist has pointed out that the creation of these seemingly attentive blind houses was also guided by a “less is more” aesthetic, reflected in the discipline, simplicity and remarkable calm of the buildings’ architecture.
My own favourite is a painting of a building viewed from an angle, its walls dark and subdued while the roof almost radiates light.
In that work, Rico has given us everything: the darkness that forms an intriguing and inexplicable underlying element throughout the series, the balanced composition, and the luminous roof which does not close the image but instead opens it up and lifts it skyward.
Perhaps the series is approaching completion.
Yet several new works have appeared recently.
One of them unexpectedly depicts two dark, shadow-like figures moving towards the viewer through black water, attempting—perhaps in vain—to gather fragments of light from its surface.
The painting is called Light Gatherers. It is faintly unsettling and deeply fascinating.
Series: Blind Houses
