[The Daily Bread, mural at the Torrassa (exit L1), L’H, 5 December 2015 to 4 January
2016]
“A proposition can seem absurd and the absurdity of its surface can be swallowed up by
the depth, which, so to speak, lies behind it.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
Claes Oldenburg said that the painting of our time must be able to convey a triple
aspiration: it must be mystical, erotic and political at the same time. It is certainly much
more than this but it is no less true that great painting, the kind we need as our daily
bread, has spiritual depth, sensual warmth and is engaged with our circumstances —
existential or political. It is difficult to find all three aesthetic paradigms in the work of a
single artist. We are, of course, plenty of painters who are only erotic, only spiritual or
only political. But theirs is a painting that, in its fragmentation, limps along, failing to
appeal to the thirsty souls of our time.
Rasmus Nilausen’s painting, however, does manage to do this. Its forms and metaphors
show us a different vision of the world, one that perceives reality without being chained
to it, one with depth, a contemplative vibration and innocence. It also has the eroticism
of someone who has understood that existence is not only soul but also body, delight,
voluptuousness and irony. The voluptuousness of one who communicates depths from
the disbelief in great truths. And finally, it has the political restlessness, as in the piece
The Daily Bread, of one who wants to improve the existence of others by fighting against
their own existence.
Rasmus Nilausen has been able to shape his own particular imagery, cultivating a
method as anachronistic as it is subtle, which he calls Potential Unarticulated. It involves
using painting as a mediator of what existential painters and poets — I am thinking of
Wols and Michaux — called a world ‘autre’, with random references to an imaginary that
is stretched, cut up, disarticulated, as if it were a piece of chewing gum. The starting
point is not quite reality, nor is it a sensation; it is rather an obsession, usually cognitive,
sometimes partially inspired by the world: it can be an unfinished philosophical thought,
an unusual observation of a child, an anonymous popular expression. From there he
creates a potential painting, which, to begin with, is never a vision and it is never
articulated because he does not use rational thought but rather, in a radical way, intuitive
thought. He seems to claim to be the heir to a modern dreamlike tradition, with a distant
beginning in naïve art and surrealist thinking of the interwar period but passed through
the craziest sieve of psychedelic figuration of the 1970s; all this elevated by the
symbolic-metaphorical fecundity of the latest wave of figurative painting of the 1990s:
think, Alex Katz, Peter Doig and, at times, Luc Tuymanns.
The mural he has done for L’Hospitalet is called daily bread. An expression well
anchored in our cultural genome but far removed from our everyday narrative. A music
that resonates in Rasmus’s brain and that he begins to unleash through painting: first he
paints bread baguettes, then he includes them on a large scale as if it were a
communion of baguette magnets on a fridge and finally, the political and metaphysical
meaning: the allegory of baguettes placed vertically, one behind the other, as if they
were the chalk markings of a convict in a prison, equating the artist’s daily occupation to
that of any citizen who has to earn their bread by working hard in their daily lives. This
description is equivalent to the starting point of the mural, The Daily Bread, presented at
the Estrany-de la Motta gallery in 2015. In L’Hospitalet there is a further evolution, with
the baguettes transformed into slices of bread with holes on their surface in the form of
keyholes. The slices become doors, a clear Huxleyan door, doors of perception through
which we catch a glimpse of an ulterior dimension. Because great painting never ends in
itself, it is always a condenser of mystery and lets us think erotically of another,
sensorially or cognitively, possible and inhabitable world. So, we return to Oldenburg:
erotics, politics, mysticism.
The bread keyhole also refers to old obsessions of Rasmus Nilausen, such as his
interest in the Renaissance camera obscura, which in his recent work he has
deconstructed and reformulated, in every way possible. We can often identify his artwork
by the large cones and pyramidal geometries that appear. It is the metaphor that takes
us back to the origins of civilised cognitive thinking: the perspective, which requires three
elements that Rasmus likes to disarticulate in his work: space, light and shadow. The
reference to these three elements in the Torrassa metro station mural has disappeared,
leaving the most elementary expression of the camera obscura: the keyhole through
which it can be observed. It may be that this work marks the end of this last strange and
ocular period and that he is entering new latitudes, perhaps more obscure and
mysterious. Either way, it marks the end of a period, just as Rasmus Nilausen does each
time when he amplifies his symbols to enormous proportions, to the point of almost
conquering the frame of the painting.
This is a great moment for Rasmus Nilausen, on his return to Barcelona following a few
years in London and now installed in his studio in L’Hospitalet, enveloped by a healthy
and sophisticated working environment. We realised this at the excellent exhibition at
the Estrany-de la Motta gallery earlier this year. There we noticed that all his fertile and
subtle imagery was captured with great force and formal character, abandoning the
pictorial ambiguities of previous years. With Rasmus Nilausen great painting returns, no
longer potential but a manifest reality.
La traducció d’aquest text ha disposat d’un ajut de l’Institut Ramon Llull
albert mercadé 