CARSTEN KROGSTRUP AND HIS SILENT MYSTIQUE 
CARMEN HUST | ARTICULATE #17 | OCTOBER 2018
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The Danish visual artist Carsten Krogstrup has an inherent desire for non-specific narratives, and depicts how he experiences and interprets life, with the solemn goal to delineate how it feels to be (part of) the human species.
 
Upholding oil painting as his preferred medium, Krogstrup projects a distinct anthropocene ideology, in which human kind plays the decisive factor. The artist seems to have a predilection for painting, caused by its increased depth and gravity, unachievable working with other medias, according to the artist. 

The academic competence and integrity of Krogstrup is universal, when he with a seldom humbleness exposes his work(s). 

During the work with his models, coincidences occur, and ideas mutate, multiply and transform. If necessary, Krogstrup doesn’t mind adjusting the compositional aspects in favor of the technical subtleties, in his search for the optimal solution. His paintings, resembling a photographic representation of human kind in an anonymous interior or city-scape, are planned to the slightest detail, but often changes in the process. 

He chooses his motifs with a sense of intuition; with what’s making (primarily) an aesthetically sense and resonates, as he explains. 

Paradox resonates with Krogstrup, who also is fascinated by the problematic yet inseparable relation between aesthetics and ethics (Miller, 2016). 

In addition, it’s important to the artist to differentiate the diagnose between the two, not upholding the two phenomena as familiar, nor alike. Adding that beauty comes in various shapes.
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In Krogstrup’s adolescence the early works of the Swedish painter Ole Billgren caught his eye, as Billgren gave way for an exquisite talent towards realism and mysticism. The editor and (agent) provocateur Tom Jørgensen seeks, in his analysis of realism, to defend the phenomenon as an ism representing more than a simple simulation of reality. 

His argument is that the artist ultimately designs the context within which his work is produced. In Krogstrup’s spirit, Jørgensen has translated the brushstrokes of the artist into an awkward portrayal of high-society environments, where cool women and men, dressed in impeccably expensive haute couture, are walking around in fashionable shopping streets, watching shop fronts, looking at art exposed at exclusively furnished galleries, withdrawing themselves from a busy week in their fancy palaces. According to Jørgensen, the neutral and superficial observation rapidly makes way for a Hitchcock-like sinister atmosphere, where the paradise of materialism leaves the beautiful men and women in isolation and solitude (Jørgensen).

In the series portraying greyhounds, Krogstrup is inspired by Irish Francis Bacon, who in spite of his surrealistic and expressionistic fashion, always has trailed his attention.  

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This article about CARSTEN KROGSTRUP is the cover article of ARTICULATE #17. Check out the full release below