Ahead of his current solo exhibition, A Silence of Things Lost and Found, Danish painter Martin Aagaard Hansen spoke with Brigade Gallery Director, Karen Foss Becker, about the apartment that inspired the show, the slow erosion of memory into speculation, and why his practice has, for the first time, extended into sculpture.
Could you share your thoughts on your current solo exhibition – how would you describe this new body of work?
The works shown in this exhibition centre around a specific place I visited over a period of ten years: the apartment of a dear friend that, during the 1960s and 70s, was part of a milieu frequented by Situationist artists, writers and musicians.
Its inherent painting context was what initially drew me there, but I found myself returning again and again because of the friendship I developed with the widow of the household.
When she passed away, I helped clear out her home - a task that transformed a place full of history and activity into a vacant room inhabited by ghosts. I tried to honour the energy of the space with a lousy bouquet of flowers, the only one I could get my hands on late in the evening after a workday.
Placed by the window without a vase, the flowers reminded me of the impossibility of reconciling loss, and of whom these gestures are really for - a quiet and absurd moment to have with oneself when viewed through the lens of the vastness of everything that has been and everything that will be.
The works depict flower bouquets in different stages of withering, sometimes abstracted into lingering pendulums struggling to keep their heads up, as if attempting to keep something alive when everything that once was has already passed.
This now-vacant room became an opportunity to portray a feeling of dusty, old melancholia - a point where past and present meet at a junction.
From this feeling, other images and ideas emerge: thoughts about life, people, some known and some unknown, and the beautiful absurdity of living, sharing memories, and carrying stories passed on by those we encounter.
This doldrum-like feeling manifests as a strangely unsolicited optimism that acts as the driving force behind my work.
The title A Silence of Things Lost and Found borrows from these ideas, particularly the act of carrying stories that have been entrusted to you by others.
Another aspect is an almost phobia-like fear of losing things that hold value for me. This "phobia" extends to other people's belongings as well - I can almost become unwell when I see people being careless with their possessions.
I place far too much value on dead objects. But perhaps that is precisely why I am able to make work about them, and to care for them in the way that I do.
The Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, from whom the exhibition title is borrowed, talks about an "instant now" – is time something you try to capture in your work?
Absolutely. The "instant now" does not exist without everything that informed it, and everything that came before it.
That is why my work moves quite freely across different temporal planes. It can be about something I experienced last week, or something I have only heard about but never witnessed myself. In fact, my strongest curiosity often lies in what I have not seen. I become fascinated by things I can only imagine, and through the work I am able to offer a suggestion of how they might have looked, felt or existed.
The distance between memory, imagination and reality is a space I return to often.
Absence and traces of people seem to permeate your paintings - can you elaborate?
I think I have already touched on this, but I am fascinated by how deeply we imprint ourselves onto our surroundings. We affect spaces, objects and people to such an extent that we often remain present even in our absence.
Of course, time eventually erodes those traces, but that is a whole other fascination for me. There is something beautiful about the way presence slowly transforms into evidence, and evidence eventually becomes speculation.
Punctures, openings and portals are words that repeatedly appear when you talk about your work - can you expand on this?
The punctures are what I call the light sources in my paintings. They are elements that feel fixed within a more unstable or flowing composition - something that demands attention and feels almost lodged within the surface.
Sometimes adding paint is not enough. Occasionally it requires an actual cut or hole in the canvas to create the sensation of something being physically wedged into place.
Openings and portals refer more to the architectural settings within the works. A hallway might suggest access to another space while ultimately leading only to a blank wall.
These elements reinforce a kind of theatrical or diorama-like quality that I have always been interested in. I often think of the paintings as existing within a constructed reality - something rooted in the real world but never quite able to access or fully grasp it.
For this exhibition you are presenting a new addition to your practice: wooden sculptures. When did this extension emerge, and how does it relate to your painterly practice?
I think there has always been a desire to move towards a more sculptural language, but for a long time it felt as though sculpture belonged to other artists, not to me.
I have always collected objects with a curiosity about what they might become part of, without necessarily knowing what that would be.
The woodworking aspect comes from my interest in joinery and the technical craft of cabinetmaking. My grandfather also spent years building the same farmhouse out of matchsticks, day after day. My grandmother, meanwhile, collected dolls and dollhouses, so I grew up surrounded by miniatures and spent a lot of time helping her arrange figurines and interiors.
Looking back, they are probably the two people I can thank most for my indirect path into making art.
The sculptures share certain visual qualities with the paintings, but I also want them to remain distinct. I have never been particularly interested in sculptures that simply look like paintings translated into three dimensions. If an object is going to exist as a sculpture, it should have its own reason for being one.
Perhaps that is simply a principle I have developed through always approaching ideas from a painter's perspective first.
It seems as if architecture is a constant focus in your work – what is this fascination with places and spaces?
One of my closest friends is an architect, and he is probably the person who opened my eyes to the importance of window placement, of presence and absence within buildings, and even the possibility of anti-composition in architecture.
I look very much to the work of the Swiss architect Aurelio Galfetti - seemingly vacant spaces, darkened hallways and staircases.
The architecture in my work functions more as a suggestion of space, one that at the same time feels rather flat or incorrect in relation to perspective.
I think houses and buildings can be quite funny. When you reduce them to their essence, they are simply decorated shelters that we inhabit.
That thought catches me off guard from time to time.
Some structures feel oppressive or strangely hostile towards human beings, which makes it all the more amusing that they were designed by humans in the first place.
I often think about the title of Alan Resnick's short horror film This House Has People in It. There is something wonderfully unsettling about that phrase, as if someone is pointing out a mistake.
When developing a painting, a cycle of creation and erosion is central to your process – can you tell us more about this?
I think this comes from the fact that my process usually begins with a feeling I do not yet know how to articulate.
I often start a painting very suddenly, simply to establish some kind of relationship with colour and surface. But that initial approach almost always leads to changes in direction.
As I work, certain elements resist being painted over or washed away. Those remnants eventually become important because they reinforce the layered sense of time already present within the subject matter.
In that sense, partially eroded forms are constantly taking on new roles until the painting settles. Things are always transforming during the making process, and I think the work ultimately carries evidence of those transformations.
The paintings in this exhibition are rendered in a dark, dusty colour palette - how do you choose your colours?
I am drawn to colours that exist somewhere between other colours. Greys that almost border on a hue, dark colours that appear black straight from the tube but reveal themselves when spread thinly across a surface, or browns that feel rusty or metallic.
I am not an artist who obsessively analyses colour, but I do spend a great deal of time trying to make colours work in slightly unexpected ways.
It sounds banal, but sometimes I find myself reaching for a colour that does not yet exist.
The process can feel a bit like not knowing exactly what you want to eat - or even whether you are hungry in the first place. It is about finding a balance that contains something unforeseen, something that should not quite work and yet somehow does.