Kehnet Nielsen and Erik Steffensen at DCA - New York - Brief Article

This show, at a Chelsea gallery devoted to Danish contemporary art, paired two Copenhagen artists, Kehnet Nielsen and Erik Steffensen. Nielsen was represented by three large paintings (each about 10 feet square) in the main gallery space and nine smaller paintings in a side gallery. By all appearances, Nielsen is seriously immersed in the existential aspects of painting. He realizes his abstract images by improvising a struggle with the material until the painting reveals its particular light. To this end, Nielsen manipulates paint by scraping it onto the surface, underpainting in dark colors, overpainting in lighter ones and then scratching back into the surface to dig up buried color. His elusive palette of muddy plums, acidic yellows and sunrise oranges appears to have been influenced by his countryman Per Kirkeby, with whom he shares a wintry, dulled light. Clyfford Still is also present in Nielsen's palette-knifed paint patches and craggy frontality. The scratched surfaces in a number of the paintings divide up the front plane like a map, precisely fitted stones or a brittle frozen river. In front of those canvases, I couldn't help thinking of a story in Isak Dinesen's Winter's Tales in which a brother and sister get trapped on an ice floe and are carried away down a river.

No doubt a common motif in Danish art and literature, ice is a favored subject of Erik Steffensen, who showed a series of photographs of icebergs printed blood red, as well as a series of photographs of the American landscape. For the iceberg photos, Steffensen used black-and-white negatives but printed the images with color photographic chemicals. The resulting images are a weird conjunction of cold subject and hot depiction.

His shots of Arizona are equally eerie. Four photographs, taken from a single black-and-white negative, depict a horizontal sliver of the Painted Desert underlining a big sky. The images are digitally colored in duochromes of chemical oranges and grays, or monochromes of orange or yellow. They have a miragelike remove and also suggest reflections in the top of an open barrel of oil. The same process is used, but with varied negatives, in a second Painted Desert series that depicts distant yellow hills and softly astringent purple rain clouds.

The title given to this show, "Migrations," apparently refers to Steffensen's U.S. travels and to the European-born Abstract Expressionists Rothko and de Kooning who have influenced Nielsen's work. Although both artists have channeled American myths, the show also contrasted two types of romantic sensibility. Nielsen is a romantic idealist who finds authenticity in mystery and emotion; Steffensen, whose work's poisoned sublimity Baudelaire would have admired, appears to be a romantic ironist with a more jaundiced eye.

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