Christian Skeel

Christian Skeel’s new paintings deal with different corners of the world’s visual presence on a scale from open winter landscapes, waves and tree trunks to other artists’ pictures and film stills. The paintings have in common that they all lead the familiar and intimate, originally photographed,  space out to the border where it partly breaks down in visual paradoxes.

The familiar spaces and scenarios are folded into boxes or dissolved to a series of frames that move into the picture, thereby bringing disorder into what is near and far and what is up or down. On another level the paintings combine the photorealistic and almost transparent representation with more dense textures of paint, which points to the painterly act as a material and bodily phenomenon. The paintings are not just snap-shots of spaces that stand still, but also spaces that takes place through time. To step into such landscapes is also to step out into a more disorienting space, where things are misplaced compared to how they use to be, retranslated through a materialized and kaleidoscopic approach.

On the other hand, all these confusing spaces and visual wrong-turns don’t seem to lead directly to chaos. There are in the paintings also a calm and sense of balance, that invite to absorption and make it possible to come nearer the spaces and experiences which lie just outside or behind the objective eye of the camera.

Text in Danish (PDF)