FORM IS WHAT HAPPENS

From the top: installation view; Tobias Buckel, at Form is What Happens, Archiv Massiv, Leipzig / Courtesy and © the artists

“Form is what happens. It’s the fact of things in the world, however they are.” is a little known quote from the American poet Robert Creeley. With this statement he extended his prior principle “Form is never more than an extension of content”, which his older colleague Charles Olson used in 1950 in a manifest for the ‘Projective Verse’ – an open-form lyric. They demanded a separation of postmodern poetry from its static tradition and encouraged abstract tendencies, which had already begun in fine arts. Creeley’s proposition applied to the freedom of artistic expression and its diversity. Yet, despite its early empowerment, the form remains a condition of artistic production, be it a form of formlessness. Also contemporary painting – another medium that is preceded by a dictate of forms – is confronted with the question of what could be considered a painterly form today and which parameters determine its motifs. 

INTERVIEW: JORDAN TATE

all images above: Jordan Tate and Rick Silva at New Shelter Plan, Copenhagen / courtesy and © the artists 

Much discussed during the last Century, we keep on asking what role photography plays in our current society. For Jordan Tate, a 1981-born American multi-media artist who holds a degree in Philosophy and one in Photography, the medium and the image are always "fundamentally inseparable": His art negotiates the practice, the action, the process of image making and their perception through the context of photography. Within these subjects, Tate's photographic works are not necessarily two dimensional, they are also animated, sculptural or they extend their form into an installation. Living and working in Cincinnati, his current show DRAPE WAVE in the Copenhagen-based project space New Shelter Plan exhibits several works that he and his colleague Rick Silva created together. In our interview Tate told me about this collaboration, about the aura and the object-hood of the photographic image.

INTERVIEW: RASMUS NILAUSEN

all works by Rasmus Nilausen at Traneudstillingen, Copenhagen, courtesy and © Rasmus Nilausen

There is something boy'ish about the way Rasmus Nilausen smiles. Its like a small blink. As if he knew a funny thing that he decided not to share. And it is a very similar misteriousness that can be found in his paintings: each holding a story that is suggested through symbolic references, the paintings' visual appearance often guides in a completely different direction. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic and sometimes just absurd. Based in Barcelona for more than a decade, the a 35-year old Danish painter uses his exhibitions to reformulate and, specifically, to re-invent the way we look at paintings. He tracks down the process of painting – unfolds it to its very basic techniques – and finds a new literalness to tell their stories. Rasmus explores the recipe of historical masterpieces and proceeds hoping that, as he has stated in a previous interview in 2011, "the perfect painting is always the one that I am about to paint – the next one." Having shown his works in art institutions, such as the ICA in London and Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona, Salvatore, his current exhibition at Traneudstillingen in Copenhagen is his first show in Denmark.