cardboard in which the moon is just a paper moon is latent in Ivan
Andersen's paintings. Faced with his pieces which at first glance seem to
draw their motifs from everyday life in Danish suburbia - hot dog stands,
drowsy villas and empty roads - we quickly become struck by a feeling that
something is not quite right here.
The houses seem to tear loose from their sockets, strange beams of light
penetrate the roofs of the houses, the hot dog stand is melting on the
ground. You cannot be too sure of your safety either !
Freud once wrote that the eeriest experiences in the world were those
moments
in which we sense that our well-known everyday surroundings suddenly seem
alien before our gaze - when it suddenly dawns upon you that it is not
reality you are experiencing, but just something which looks like it.
The
world seems as if it having a fit of laughter over your belief in its
stability, over your belief in that you know anything about the world
at all.
This paranoia in Ivan Andersen's paintings is underscored by the painterly
style: A tight, rather oblique naturalism composed by square planes and
patches of paint contradict the colourful expressionist elements in which
the
paint floats and drips across the canvas - in a formalistic sense, Ivan
Andersen's works seem to be fraying around the edges as well.
A black sense of humour seems to point a way out in the artist's pictorial
universe, though - towards a release from pathos and banality in the
execution in the work and towards a release from a world that is basically
experienced as a fraud.
But maybe it is exactly because it is a fraud that it is also quite funny
?