Henrik's
career as a painter constitutes one of the most compact careers in art history.
Arriving in Henri
Matisse's villa in Vence on a Saturday in late June 2002, equipped with nothing
but his palate, he went through a dozen phases in the (painting) course of a
week.
He started off
with a stylized Matisse collage in acrylics, with a red guitar that came to
be a standard ingredient in his early works.
Henrik went on
to produce miniature imitations of famous works of art, i e a smaller, liberal
copy of his first painting. This also concluded his Red Guitar period.
Semi-realism was
next, with a rolling Provence scenery. His green lavender fields were erroneously
interpreted by American critics to be trees, an interpretation that led Henrik
into his Black Period.
His Black Period
offered relief - literally - in the shape of a Matisse-inspired female figure,
to be seen and felt when holding the black painting at a certain angle. Tilt-and-look-and-feel
art.
Henrik's apparent
depression was refined into his aggressively critical Whatsthepointilism.
Combining the pixel imagery from his secondary career in the computer business
with the impressionistic elements in accessible Danish works, Henrik posed the
What's the point question in bright colors on an appropriately quadratic
canvas. Typically for his avant garde position, temporary artists were unable
to answer the question, let alone see it.
As a cynical response,
Henrik changed to ultra-realism, in the shape of an unpainted canvas.
Later, replacing
quality with quantity, Henrik moved on to increase his number of works toward
the end of his career. In other words on Thursday evening.
Inspired by the
Ballou school of suggestive backgrounds, Henrik painted his deeply symbolic
semi-religious work in cold Ballou blue, Burgundy red, Chianti white and cool
Provence rosé.
Henrik's career as a painter was abruptly stopped in the middle of his uncompleted Felinistic period, since other artists wanted to use him as a model. By Friday evening, Henrik's brilliant if modest career as a painter had come to a stop, and just like his fellow Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl once burned his Ra raft, Henrik dismounted his canvases from the frames, and walked off into the Provencal starry starry night in his Van Gogh socks and his ears intact.
A few glimpses of the artist's Vence production