Galleri Tom Christoffersen

exhibitions

Christian Skeel: Untitled. 2007, oil on canvas, 178 x 178 cm.

Galleri Tom Christoffersen is proud to present Christian Skeels solo exhibition, CLOSE-UPS. Skeels new paintings deal with different corners of the worlds’ 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. Through the paintings a disorienting space is visualized, where everything is slightly 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 lead directly to chaos. There is in the paintings also a calm and sense of balance, that invites to absorption and makes it possible to come nearer the spaces and experiences which lie just outside or behind the objective eye of the camera.In connection with the exhibition there will also be published the book Nærbilleder with paintings by Christian Skeel and text by the poet and critic Lars Bukdahl. The book as well as the exhibition is financially supported by Statens Kunstfond.

Christian Skeel, b. 1956, works as artist and composer. He has together with Morten Skriver made installations, books, and films, most recently the exhibition Interferens at Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, 2005. As composer he has produced cds such as Metropolitan Suide (w. Martin Hall), Samlede Kompositioner (w. Morti Vizki), and Short Pieces. In advance of the actual book are other projects such as Rejsebog, Vej and Den usynlige dreng made together with the poet Morti Vizki.