Legionnaires of Color

Curiosity drove me to ask Adam about the slides he had sent to me in Berlin in 1996 to apply for the university. Looking at them again, I was surprised by their presence and clarity. The icy blue and warm ochre could have come from a current watercolor. Is it possible that every new good picture that a painter creates shows the old ones in a better light—and the other way around too? I remembered Adam’s early work as lighter, softer, and more atmospheric. At that time, I was impressed by the consistency with which he was able to imaginatively cast a formal idea into a series of 24 images. Well, some have it—some don’t. Then a polite young man arrived from the Danish capital to introduce himself. I had already decided to accept him into my class. Throughout my many years of teaching, students from Scandinavia always enjoyed a special status. More on that later.

After a long and deliberate period of reflection, and sporadic attempts at writing or written interpretation, I know now what can be said and what can’t, and I also know what I can’t explain, but understand. I want to write this text now without a whole lot of fuss or fanfare.

In painting, too, every brushstroke must be set down correctly. Some things call for sober consideration, but the moment a decision is made, the peacock spreads his magnificent violet fan with masterful authority. Without the color violet, Adam’s watercolors would not be so close to the end of all things.

Postcard-sized photographic prints of his watercolors lie spread out on a long table. In the last few days, they have become familiar acquaintances, and I have sorted them into groups according to formal criteria, color themes, and content. In doing this, I discovered enchanting couples, quartets; some have remained attractive singles, and for others I couldn’t find a fourth card by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, I muse over and over again, looking at it this way the entire group becomes a vast story, seemingly without beginning or end—a dream game of cards that must have come into being through a great deal of water flowing through the paintbrush, and a great deal of blood through the veins.

It is high time to continue writing, but still I hesitate, gaze at the photos, and think about the utter lack of peace on our planet. Its inmates, in their unfulfilled desire, are betrayed and sold without mercy. 

The glossy surfaces of the photographs seem to transform themselves suddenly into dangerously shimmering chemical substances. Fleeing to my desk, I hear      beguiling voices, “Play with us, play with us, please don’t leave us alone.” Numbed, I sit there holding three cards in my left hand. The neon light has stopped humming; it has become hard to breathe. I follow the game absently. The little foreign legionnaire in one of them beats the drum, or perhaps he is actually holding a paintbrush, and the drum is a painting…with his violet uniform he wouldn’t survive a battle—he’d be shot down like a golden hare. On the other card, I can trust only the blue on the lower edge. As I look at the third card, the breath slowly flows back into my body. I want to start writing, but an iron hand grips my pen—tiny color particles flutter down from the butterfly wing on the man’s tattooed chest and onto my white sheet of paper. As if of their own accord, letters take shape and I recognize the word “Papillon.” The faces of Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman emerge in irreal shades of color.

The wondrous color vision has disappeared, the three picture cards are no longer in my hand, only the pen scratches on the paper softly. I am alone with the white page.

A clear, blue morning sky shines over Berlin and I sense a deep, blue watercolor-sea. My thoughts are drawn to Iceland: sailors dressed the way we used to recognize seamen, cross a small square. They carry a heavy anchor and its long chain on their shoulders. In the distance, a three-masted sailboat is on a course heading directly toward me.

In painting, Adam creates a device for night-vision in order to recover mysterious, contemplative images from the darkness of forgetting, to keep them alive and transform them into paintings.

He often visits me in my studio. I visit him when new pictures are finished or just before they leave his studio. He works in the day, I in the night. After the work is done, he likes to come over for tea for an hour or two. He always brings along a piece of cake and often something to show—the draft for the cover of an art magazine, a new drawing, or an art book that has just been published.

Adam is an unusual worker. He possesses a calm discipline and is completely unpretentious in the creation of his objects. He has a clear, good mind. His comments on my pictures are important to me, I often solicit them. Our friendship is rooted in art, in painting and in all the themes and uncertainties connected with the aesthetic life. I love his humor, his laugh is like that of a faun. What people like about each other has nothing to do with the rationales of dutiful explanation—through these, love suffers, and so does painting.

Let an idea be what it will—whoever fails to empathize with the confluence of thousands and millions of color particles that adhere to a sheet of paper in the wake of water bound with gum arabic, glycerin, honey and oxgall may easily suffer aesthetic shipwreck. If you set a watercolor up at an angle to soak up excess water with an absorbent paintbrush, an ocean can tilt sideways and whole continents can sink. Brute violence and the utmost tenderness mark the sensibility of the true adventurer of color. At incomprehensible sizes and in nearly invisible things a universal fate is revealed—even on one sheet of paper. This is how we talk, this is how our discussions go.

We still have a project before us: a walk together from my Kreuzberg studio to the Paris Bar in Charlottenburg. It’s a good thing Adam doesn’t give up. The thought of Charlottenburg suddenly reminds me that now Adam lives there, near where I was born, where I took my first steps, right next to Savignyplatz. In 1941, the bombs were slowly beginning to fall on Berlin. My mother and I moved East to the Oderbruch to live with relatives in the countryside. In February 1945 we fled back to Berlin from the advancing Russian troops. The sirens were howling, the bombs falling. With my grandmother, I ran into the closest air-raid cellar. Everything around us seemed to be exploding, there was a deafening thunder, the cellar was shaken in its very foundations. The walls stood at dangerous angles, you couldn’t see anything for the dust. The air cleared again, but the dull fear remained.

In the summer of 1959, I sat on a train to Swedish Lapland. In Berlin, the vestiges of war had still not been overcome, the damage to the people and their city was immeasurable. What once had been a center of European life was now the vast, empty desert of Potsdamer Platz, a place where wild rabbits hopped among the weeds. In the morning, I reached Stockholm and visited the Moderna Museet. At twilight, I boarded the train for Gällivare. From that point on, it didn’t become dark anymore. The space expanded, and for the first time I saw nature in its purest state. This trip to Lapland always seems to me like the construction of an unknown happiness. 

On Devil’s Island in French Guyana, a white-haired man, grown old before his time and with a butterfly tattooed on his chest, watches the rhythm of the tides closely. He has built two rafts made of sacks filled with coconuts. The hour of his escape is at hand. Dega hesitates: “You’ll die, Papillon!” The friends embrace in parting. Papillon leaps, an insane fall into the crashing surf below. Using his arms and legs to paddle the raft forward, he reaches the open sea, and floats away to freedom.   

Bernd Koberling, January 2009

Halfway between the gutter and the stars

Man is certainly crazy.

He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

Michel de Montaigne

I first met Adam Saks in Berlin in 1999. After five years as a student at the Royal Academy of fine Arts in Copenhagen, he spent a year at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, 1996 – 97. He had applied to the school with the specific intent of studying under Bernd Koberling. Saks was drawn to Koberling’s free and singular way of depicting experiences of nature in a process that was both spontaneous and analytical.

A young artist who lifts his brush to a canvas inevitably engages in a dialogue with the entire vast tradition of painting and with all contemporary colleagues. In one’s quest for a personal voice, adopting a naïve stance and turning one’s back to tradition and the contemporary will inevitably lead to failure. In my view, Adam Saks takes the opposite approach characterized by a thirst for information and analysis. When working with images one must have a starting point, a focus for one’s quest, if you will, and in this regard Adam Saks presents a personal narrative with an imagery that is paradoxically both age-old and current, raw and sympathetic, and touching upon a myriad of vital issues.

Never before in the history of mankind has the image played the role it has today in the realm of public communications, nor has it been so levelled. In this constant flow of images that is so characteristic of our times, we tend to take the image for granted and to neglect the unique, fantastic and even magical qualities that are brought to bear. It is awe inspiring, for example, that we can be moved by the gaze of an unknown person in a distant part of the world through rastered newspaper images, or enthralled by the smile of a loved one through the pixels of a cell phone display – or that the artist can sweep a brush across a flat surface giving rise to a space for the viewer to lose him/herself in and stoking the fires of emotion and intellect.

If we think back to Neolithic man, who rendered the features of game in the horn, the stone, or the cliff face; or to the medieval sermon goer, surrounded by holy images, perhaps then we can understand how radically different the experience of the image must have been.

In this visual world of yore, the image and the depicted merged together. The depicted offered the image legitimacy and power, and alternately, the image could also be used to directly affect the depicted, as is the case with the African nail fetish figures or the dolls of the voodoo priest.

In our present day, when art all too often functions as risk-free décor and an economic investment (but where a paradox nevertheless arises offering status to ownership and a participation in a mythical force), the fact that the image possesses a magical quality and bears something beyond our capacity to fully grasp is nevertheless an everyday experience for the artist. As soon as it leaves the studio, the image starts living a life of its own, and depending on the viewer, it can be seen as far grander or much less impressive than the artist himself/herself intended.

In the investigation Adam Saks has been conducting for several years now, he approaches a magical world of images and an extreme world of masculinity.

Few images are so intimately connected with ancient magic as the tattoo. Contrary to how it is viewed today, as merely a superficial décor (although to a certain extent it still symbolises tribal unity), in the past the tattoo often had the role of amulet and protector. Many of those who bear the typical sailor tattoo, the anchor, are ignorant of its more profound connotations: the hope that the bottom will hold out, that the chain will not break. Most of those wearing a golden earring are likewise not aware that this was originally a security measure for mariners ensuring that they would be able to pay their way across the river Styx in the event that neither next of kin nor fellow man could fulfil that final act of kindness, placing the tribute to Charon under the tongue of the deceased. 

We know that fixing an inerasable image to the skin is an act originating way back in the recesses of time. Tattoos have been found on “Ötzi”, the 5000-year-old iceman and on Egyptian mummies, and Julius Caesar himself described the full body tattoos of the Germanic tribes. The symbols in this treasure trove of imagery is steeped in implications preceding language, and often possess a naïve power and poetry in their preoccupation with hope, death, love, solidarity, suffering and betrayal. At times it is a question of written words rather than images – sometimes banal, sometimes aphoristic and powerful poetry written directly on the body. In this form, the inerasable can give rise to wonderful ironies, such as when the Napoleonic Marshall Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, who subsequently became the Swedish monarch under the name of Karl Johan, bore a tattoo with the revolutionary motto “A bas de Roi!”– down with the King!

In our longing for self-understanding, we tend to give in to the temptation of effective simplifications, which is why, during a given period of time or within a specific group, man is seen entirely as a product of culture, only to be seen in the next instance –or within another group– as entirely biologically determined. It would seem more reasonable, however, to see us as shaped by a combination of the two. Ancient biological mechanisms, controlled by electro-chemical fields and hormones, as well as various views of the world and ideologies, lead us to act irrationally and destructively, despite our longing to believe the opposite to be true. And history tells us that more people have succumbed to an irreconcilable struggle between religions and ideologies than to epidemics and natural disasters.

Here, Adam Saks has focused his interest on that which constitutes manliness in the extreme, on the French Foreign Legion, as a model and system for instrumentalising manly aggression and lust for adventure.

The legendary Legion has been a haven for men of various nationalities and classes of society since 1831. Prince Aage of Denmark, for example, made a career for himself in the legion, as did men from the gutter. Irrespective of race and nationality, one becomes part of a unity where ideals such as discipline, camaraderie and self-sacrifice for a higher goal –decided by others– are guiding principles, as are gruelling physical training and weapons expertise. This phenomenon is thereby saturated with ancient tribalism and a crusading spirit, and resembles that of the Spartan warriors and the Janissaries of the Caliph, comparable to the Mafia and Hell’s Angels of our time.

Adam Saks’ imagery entices us to focus, as though through a kaleidoscope, on our view of masculinity, sexuality and violence, femininity and love, as well as morality and ideology, and attitudes towards respect and honour.

In an art world that has long been focused on formalistic research and the urban codes of the day, an artist such as Adam Saks brings an exciting and welcome perspective posing questions that focus on the depth of mankind and the world at large. With a singular voice of his own, he lets us experience both the dark and foreboding energies of the human psyche, grants us access to the myths, and inspires us to reflect upon how profoundly different everything could have been! 

Björn Springfeldt 

Sacré Nom de Dieu

Geographers in Afric maps

With savage pictures fill their gaps

and over inhabitable downs

place elephants for wants of towns ...

Jonathan Swift

Like many a seafaring surveyor adorned in fantastic ornament and splendour, Adam Saks is a great pictorial conveyor. With swelling enthusiasm, he allows himself to drift through travel narratives, exotic oddity museums, compendiums of heraldry and emblemata, cheap comics or tattoo magazines – in fact, he has even amassed a notable collection of nautical and military devotional objects. Just as uncharted and, more often than not, unreachable distances once launched strange and wistful floating blossoms of yearning through the imagination[1], the often enigmatically occlusive souvenirs that have been brought back, and the left behind accoutrements of the departed adventurer – medallions and other belongings – still manage to strike sparks. With all that humankind claims to know about the world, these things have retained the alluringly unmapped remains of mysteriousness, which might include anything at all.

Saks’s paintings and works on paper are borne upon exactly this form of possibility; they are remote and filled with familiarly foreign stretches of land and well-trusted untrodden coastlines in beautiful abandon; coarse, seafaring romanticism; wild animals and grotesque chimeras; small ships, serpentine blazonry and shredded script. With all of these appurtenances, however, Saks nonetheless navigates away from any nostalgic vedute. The supposed faraway places of yearning are actually pure pictorial places, nearly psychedelically unfolding kaleidoscopes full of shuddering and horror. What is more, the resulting topographical bewilderment is approached by a disparately larger source of dislocation, in that the relationship between picture and world has become deeply dubious; a gaping fissure has erupted between the two. What appears to be the case is not the case at all.

Saks allows his pictures to escape a distinctively progressive narrative. He maims and dissects his motifs in favour of a discontinuous and eccentrically orbital pictorial occurrence, the erratic interim of an exuberant ‘either and or’, in which everything and everybody coalesces with everything and every one, or at least could do so. Hand painted and reflecting a striking intuition for the richness of the pigment, his pictures also possess the widest possible range of stroke velocities. In the harshly recounted and roughly painted-up areas, they eliminate and thrust; in the tenderly painted-in and calmer areas, they quietly repose. In this counter-bracing collision of congestion and propulsion; subsidence and debasement; paused suspense and quiet outbreak, the pictures consist first and foremost of motifal scraps, which are brutally stroked into and against one another in painterly collage.

In order to counter an all too persistent literalness, Saks generates a devastating ‘‘logical conflict’ [...] by dissipating [its] sense under a multiplicity of associations’.[2] With ornamental obsession, he beflecks and bespots the motifs, along with their significance, slogans and figures, letting them drift asunder in loud pictorial tumult and tumble about; or he stretches them out into tattered bands that have now begun to devour even themselves in fizzing turbulence. If his pictures are not actually carnivores, they are, at least, ‘motifores’.

It is in pure hesitation – one foot in sea and one on shore – that pictures such as skinned – stranded and sans pitié stolidly hold their ground. Steadily tossed to and fro, they chance adventure, deliver themselves to lurking danger and appear nonetheless to retreat from all that they depict. Framed by jutting rocks, they disclose jagged fjords or rugged straits, carved into the pigment as though into a woodcutting, upon which drawn-in ships are dashed to bits or, atop a cliff-lined rise, the blue and white striped little body of a young sailor donning a saucy cap has been crucified upon an oversized cross. Quaint exoticisms have no place on these shores; the pictures rear with an inhospitable and hostile bearing.

Astonished and confounded, one is forced to ascertain, on the basis of discrepancies in the proportions and elusive sense of orientation, that Saks has abandoned the pictorial whole to a ‘faltering of the form’. Together with the motifal plunder, the gaze is tossed about by the raw pictorial elements like flotsam, now stranding here, now somewhere other. Mercilessly, naive audacity is bonded to jaded humility[3]; even the promising lighthouses and the bluff-crowned and towering cross pervert themselves into symbols of horror, inviting anything but salvation. As Kant wrote with amused dread, ‘the land of truth (an exceedingly charming name) [is] surrounded by a broad and stormy oceania, the actual seat of semblance, where many a foggy bank and many a forthwith melted block of ice belie the existence of new lands by endlessly deceiving discovery driven seamen with empty promises, entwining them in adventures from which they will never be released and yet will never persevere in bringing to an end.’[4] 

Nature, embodied by something resembling a proud and threatening eagle, has turned itself away from all humankind. Full of danger, the world and its image no longer obey, and even those who have managed to retain a certain level of cultivation are no more capable of finding a place within the world they once knew. Hovering above all of this, eyes scratched into paint and presented in harsh contrast – divinely abstract ‘all-seeing eyes’, at times simply resembling scraps of font left over from an interspersion of ‘Rockeyes’ or, now and again, recalling Alberti’s ‘flying eye’[5] – gaze imperturbably down upon the occurrences below, coolly observing the inescapable fatality, and at the same time revealing the pictorial fatalism, allowed by Saks to enfold to such a great extent, in all of its childish and extravagant simplicity.

Saks unveils not only ‘oceania’ as the ‘seat of semblance’, however, but also the desert with its glistening mirages in entré comme un mouton, sorti comme un lion. The artist places a piece of landscape smack into the middle of a bleak nothingness. Like a sun-baked backdrop, this waste land unfolds along the boundaries of a rugged and weathered fortress wall that, like a barricading bulwark, spares both the picture and the gaze from gaping any further and thus plunging into still farther and unknown depths. Its weighty portal is crowned by two bull-footed towers that provide the resplendent slogan, ‘to enter as a sheep and exit as a lion’ inscribed in scribbled speech bubbles with palpable vehemence, underlining the proverbial crossroad-situation with all the more weight.

With all of its massive presence, the picture holds its ground within a constant now and against. Remote from any source of orientation, it hovers like the two demon cats who have been invoked into existence, most likely distant relatives of Lewis Carroll’s permanently grinning Cheshire cat, upon the threshold of this painterly initiation. Each and every subject or object appears as a pair. This doubling, however, slightly shifted or warped, brings no mirrored symmetrical security. It is an asymmetrical balance that Saks uses to hinder the formation of any decisive associations but at the same time to encourage every kind of dissociation in the face of streaking white branches, or confrontations: as with the concordant discord achieved between the sombrero-clad Mexican and snake, fused together into an emblematic coat of arms through their entirely unique brand of psychedelia with the sharply spiking rock arrangement behind them.

Saks exposes his pictures – and with them the beholder – with great delight and brutality to neverending transitional phenomena, in which all paths could lead anywhere at all but nevertheless regress back into themselves. Though rf is not spared from undergoing the very same exorcism in this pictorial ‘rite of passage’, the whole scene still retains something sinister. One senses the furtive danger but remains unsure of whether a crossing-over would deliver protection or perhaps reveal something vastly more horrid that is lurking behind this pictorial initiation. Meanwhile, the picture closes into itself. Though the suggestion of a gateway that is somehow implied by the obelisk and Foreign Legion shields or barriers remains open to the eye, this passage, disguised by motifal plunder, remains nevertheless impassable. Even the cat-heads close ranks to bar the way, like two fetishes with still more emphatically radiating grins. The picture closes itself in order to avoid appearing garrulous or frivolous at all costs.  

The rocks in sans pitié tower and loom with a similar wry remoteness, jutting out at the same moment in amorph organic extrusions upon two lions suspended in a wild leap and an elephant, whereby it is no longer possible to discern between crag and creature. With protruding force, the uninhibited colour-material tears open the picture plane and shoves its way threateningly close to the most outer borders of the picture. To some extent, Saks actually inverts the more customary direction of the gaze. That is to say, through allowing the picture to approach the beholder in such an aggressive manner, the beholder involuntarily draws back from it. Reassurance is offered, however, by the presence of – though devoid of long-necked giraffes and failing to simulate the Tierra del Fuego – a certain ‘Heia Safari’ in the form of a mental-projection niche on the lower right, where, drawn onto the surface with highly skilled maladroitness, a hunter perched atop a tamed elephant, framed by cutely fluffed out palm trees, is busy slaying a defenceless lion, violently rebuking nature with a visually sounding ‘puff’ of the muzzle flash. Captured in trepidation and among the grotesque, the question remains as to whether nature is the true bearer of horror, or whether the pitifully conceited and miserably overestimated self-assertion of humankind is dare say the more destructive force at work.

It is a decisional delirium, which Saks unleashes in still more staggering bluntness in his works on paper such as stranded – skinned or kleine blume schmückt. Wrecked and shattered, the motifal ruins float like raw flecks upon a porous ground, entwined in ornamental banners, frivolous garlands and crudely twisted remnants of text. The words – now large, now small; at times loud, at times tranquil; now in eloquent parlando, now in stuttering repetition – slide, falter or leap about like the colour and cascading contours. On a pictorial level, Saks causes the immense sheets to shiver. He kindles a nervous abeyance, from which even the gaze is usurped. In the same way that childishness is chained in constant clinging to morbidity, the aggression displayed is also of a double nature[6]. Not only does it turn upon everything motifal, meaningful and narrative, but also – with torn and beaten; scratching and burrowing brush strokes – against formal painterliness, so that, bewildered in the midst of the whole upheaval, one is thrilled at the sight of each and every white hole, and by a fleeting moment of pause, before being ravished by the gracile debauchery of the harbour pub depiction, with its light-hearted ladies and pickled herring still lifes; skulls, disreputable show girls and demons; or the sighing and crucified sailor boy – without any sense of hold, without any god who might save, and without any master.

For upon the shimmering ‘oceania’, or among the treachery of the desert, the pictorial fantasies – Swift’s ‘savage pictures’ – vanquish all that is reasonable. As mighty as they are brutal, they break free from their own bounds; merciless and fearless, they fail to recoil from even themselves. With fatal composure, they befall the power of imagination, flare up, die down again and swelter in self-abuse. Motifs wander and change, slip away or mirror one another, are painted off and clinched together but incessantly painted anew, merged back together and revived once more. Adam Saks bares himself with heinous abandon in his pictures, and these crotchety, awkward, nailed-down and ornery, over-packed and gracefully bizarre escapades bear themselves with heinous wantonness before the beholder.

Christian Malycha

Painting’s Transgressor

Adam Saks is making his way towards a new beauty beyond the ugly in his hybrid pictures. He belongs to the young generation of artists who have discovered the countless astonishing possibilities presented by painting and graphic art, and who paint pictures that everyone can relate to. As applies to many of his contemporary colleagues both in Denmark and abroad, his art is in a “postmedial” phase, where painting has displaced the new media. However, in no way does Saks turn the clock back to the state of innocence of abstract expressive painting, where the artist simply paints on the basis of feeling and intuition; on the contrary, he integrates his experiences from installation art, video art and computer art on the surface while inviting the surrounding world inside and disrespectfully making use of mass-media images, including children’s book illustrations, tattooing and the narrative universes of the strip cartoon. The following is a conversation between the author of this article, Lisbeth Bonde, and Adam Saks in Berlin.

We approach the gigantic oval of the runway like an eagle in flight, hovering above the roofs of the city. The Danish painter and graphic artist Adam Saks (b. 1974) is waiting for me in the warm morning mist in the oldest airport in the world, Tempelhof, “the mother of all airports” as the British architect Norman Foster has called it. An airport in the midst of southern central Berlin and a building that immediately makes arriving travellers think of the city’s national socialist past. Together, we take a taxi to the Schöneberg district a couple of kilometres away. Saks’s studio is – true to tradition – in a former factory building, but this is a bit more splendid than all the others. It is in the functionalistic style, and you can glimpse the colourful, tiled façade in those places where the deluge of bombs during the war did not destroy it. Adam Saks lives on the third floor, as he has done for a number of years to his great satisfaction, for “Berlin continues to be amazingly exciting with lots of possibilities, and it’s still cheap here,” he comments. He has scattered his very colourful new watercolours around on the floor. They are exotic landscape motifs, but on its way into the depths of the picture the eye is disturbed by words such as “Chasseurs d’hommes”, “Cavalerie”, “Etrangers” and “Body Crawling Insects”. Adam Saks has travelled widely. He most recently spent six weeks as a hermit on an atoll off Madagascar. He tries to get away from civilisation and “all that wallowing in art” and seeks to “recharge in foreign parts”. So he “subscribes” to other forms of culture in his pictures. “Here, I’ve made use of old French tattoos from the bodies of old Foreign Legion troops, so there they are absorbed into a bit of French colonial history in watercolours. Introducing foreign elements of that kind produces an exotic effect and establishes a certain distance,” he declares.

Watercolours often act as a kind of preliminary sketch for paintings – as fresh new beginnings. Is that also the case with you?

“Yes, watercolours have immediacy and spontaneity because you apply the colour intuitively and with effortless ease. I have often thought of transferring the method to my painting, but I’ve had to give it up again because painting acts best with a certain compactness, volume and finality. The watercolours are more open.”

The watercolours contain mountain landscapes with cacti and desolate and lonely expanses that are disturbed by these “tattooed” and often ominous pictorial messages: There are death’s heads or night creatures such as owls. This is a transgressor – someone who crosses boundaries. It is someone who is his own master and breaks all rules and regulations, for instance in a prison. But there are several layers of meaning in the word, which for instance can easily refer to the owl, which lives at night when the rest of us are asleep, and thus it transgresses the daily rhythm. “In the watercolours I combine a more contemplative landscape in the background with the aggressive messages in the foreground. There is a motif of inner tension; we are quite a long way from the “pretty-pretty”, from things in which there is no risk. I try to accentuate the surface and create contrasts. This also applies to my paintings. On the one hand I paint pictures as beautiful as picture postcards, that is to say peaceful, decorative motifs, and then on the other hand I constantly burst in on the charm and give the pictures a different and more dramatic content.

Don’t you ever feel a desire simply to paint beautiful pictures and like another Matisse concentrate on abundance, calm and pleasure?

“Yes, it might well be that I would like to, but I can’t carry it through. I’m forced to break with the beautiful, otherwise the painting doesn’t come to life for me. My paintings have a special energy level. I try to disturb the surface by rejecting its perfection and introducing shifts of scale and various different visual levels that gather on the surface. But still I don’t use signs in my new oil paintings. And although many of my works have “ugly” or “dirty” themes, I work with the help of both my compositional principles and my palette towards creating a beauty beyond the ugly.”

With Saks we are on our way towards a new kind of aesthetic order and so a new form of sensibility. He aims to leap between figuration and abstraction and generates some lesser forms in one painting that he blows up and turns into the principal motif in another. He zooms in and out – works with large things in a small format and small things in a large format.

There are new paintings hanging on the walls. Colourful interiors in synthetic, deliberately artificial colours, of hotel rooms, bathrooms and various other rooms.  Like many of his colleagues – also from the famous Leipzig school with names that by now are fiendishly expensive such as Matthias Weischer and Tilo Baumgärtel – he expresses himself in interiors that integrate experiences from areas such as installation art. Adam Saks paints these spatial perceptions into his colourful and signal-laden paintings with the fluidum of oil paint. Here and there he interrupts our view with large, lush green plants that bring the picture to life. The paintings as a whole give the impression of being constructions, familiar constructions or dreamt scenes, although we recognise elements from for instance interior design journals. Saks’s paintings consist of empty rooms or landscapes devoid of human figures, which are imbued with unspoken meanings and unfulfilled actions. The surfaces are crossed and recrossed by signs, fragments of nature and architectonic elements taken out of their normal contexts, and like some DJ sampler, Adam Saks put them together to form a fragmentary but harmonious whole, so one can talk of a visual collage technique with many allusions. In the pictures the light seems to shine from within, out towards the viewer. Occasionally, the objects seem to be slightly frayed at the edges, as though this were a computer collage. This is an entirely new idiom.

As far as I can see, you decompose your paintings. You create some rules, which you constantly break, and in this way you are constantly moving into new areas – at the same time as you tempt the viewer into the picture by making use of familiar objects. It is a subtle seduction strategy.

“I must all the time exceed my own limitations and also seduce myself into moving into new places. Let me give you an example: Last year, I made four covers for the Danish art periodical “Billedkunst”, which at that time was still edited by the historian of ideas, Lars Morell. Here, I set myself a special task: I wanted to make use of four different techniques or media in order to force myself to go on. There was no reason to make a “series series” because three months elapsed between the separate issues. Each cover was act 3-2-1, that is to say first you see it on the bookseller’s shelf, where the front cover is intended to act as an eye catcher. When you have read the magazine and put it down again, the back cover must also be interesting, while it must also be possible to put it down open, for instance if the phone rings. I used the water colour, the computer drawing – which I often take into use when producing sketches for the paintings – and also “Buntstift”, as it’s called down here, that’s to say a coloured pencil, and finally the etching. All these approaches were to have a frayed look. The etching is done with a drill and hammer that leaves tiny pricks in the copper plate – it’s primitive and rough, and you have to hold the drill very firmly so it doesn’t slip. The result is a quite special quality that can’t be produced by hand. It looks a bit like a scar or a tattoo or something that’s sewn on with a sewing machine. As for the computer drawing, I used the simplest programme – Paint – which produces a naïve and straightforward result. Afterwards I “collaged” the computer drawing – that is to say printed the individual bits out and put them together like a collage. As for the coloured pencil drawings, I have here clearly mimicked a tattoo. That is to say four widely different techniques, four different idioms that talk to each other.”

Why are you so interested in tattoos?

“I’m mainly interested in the ‘old school’ tattoos from the turn of the last century that were used by marginalised groups. They people were often anomalous figures without a permanent job, for instance soldiers, sailors, prostitutes and generally speaking without material possessions. The tattoos, these drawings that they quite literally carried around on their bodies, were the only evidence of the life they lived, and so their life stories were imprinted on their skin, as were the values they stood for, and that’s something I find extremely interesting. Many of them were done in prison, and they have a primitive directness and contain a combination of images that have something of the quality of a rebus. In reality, those wearing these tattoos were a kind of walking Rauschenberg paintings with their many layers and combinations. I start out from a special series of themes that the French Foreign Legionnaires and the penal colonies in French Guyana went in for. Tattoos today have become quite presentable and accepted, but the modern tattoos are of no interest to me whatever.”

Adam Saks grew up in Klampenborg north of Copenhagen. He drew a great deal even as a child – it was a natural occupation for him and far preferable to football. After Adam had finished at grammar school, his architect father fixed him up as a pupil of Svend Wiig Hansen at Elsinore, where he “got ready for” the Academy. It was the time when Wiig was wrestling with the great sculpture “Generation Succeeds Generation” for the Ministry of Culture on Gammel Strand. Adam Saks entered the Academy at the age of 19 after an instructive year with Svend Wiig Hansen: “Svend was emotionally extremely generous and when he set about painting, he did so with a directness that appealed to me. His expressiveness, determination and speed impressed me even though I myself work differently – at greater length and with more constructed and mediated imagery than he did. But from Svend I derived the courage to attack the canvas without hesitation,” says Saks. In the Academy he first had the painter Elmer and the sculptor Øivind Nygård as his teachers, “and they were two totally different but inspiring role models”. After this, he was persuaded by some visiting German teachers, including Troels Wörsel and Jutta Koether, to come to Germany. Here he made contact with Bernd Koberling in Berlin, studying under him for a year before returning to the School of Graphics in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, something that was of inestimable value for his artistic training. “These were paradisiacal conditions, an Eldorado of exciting, graphic possibilities. I learned all the techniques: computer printing, serigraphy, lithography, woodcuts, etching – you name it. It was possible to switch from one to the other as quickly as you wanted. I mainly made serigraphs – silk prints – and experimented wildly with all the possibilities. I finished off by painting in Claus Carstensen’s school of painting, and he was absolutely marvellous. His vision was legendary, and his lectures were simply unsurpassed. But the time I spent in the School of Graphics has meant a great deal to me,” says Saks.

What artistic affinities do you have?

“The American-British painter Malcolm Morley has influenced me a great deal. For instance, he paints from a watercolour by squaring it off on the canvas. In doing so he achieves the spontaneity of the watercolour in the larger format while at the same time each of the individual squares constitutes an independent painting. So he extends between a microcosm and a macrocosm, and the small squares turn into pure Monet paintings. The picture only emerges when you take four steps back. At the same time he goes in for an exciting exotic range of motifs and builds up his pictorial space in an interesting way. He was a pioneer in American neo-expressionism in the 1970s, and he was a pioneer in photorealism rather earlier, so he has an enormous range – and he’s really very exciting indeed. Also the Los Angeles artist Larry Pittman – especially his picture compositions, which are very graphic – has meant a great deal for my own work, although his range of homosexual motifs doesn’t interest me.”

We can clearly see what your paintings represent, but on the one hand there are no human figures in your landscapes and rooms – they are often rooms through which one passes, anonymous public or semi-public rooms – and on the other hand several planes of reality come together on your surfaces. Why will you not go in for total fiction?

“I work with hybrid paintings and break the fiction down. I paint things so they emerge immediately, at random and constructed on the surface. Among other things I paint large palm leaves that act as abstract elements. If you look, there’s a white border that I’ve painted to make it look like a computer drawing. I use various methods of paintings – some of the elements are painted with great accuracy and very smoothly, while others are more abstract. I try to step up the tension in the pictorial space and alternate between the more expressive and the more precise and detailed. If you use the same “handwriting” everywhere then I think it will just die.”

And do you have anything emotional hidden away in your paintings?

“Yes, I do, in fact. I paint a lot of biographical touches into the paintings, things that mean something quite special to me. But I do it indirectly and discreetly. For instance, when I paint a bed it’s because it is particularly significant to me: this is where I can be inactive and contemplative; here all the hierarchies of waking life are suspended; here life merges into my thoughts, and here I’m taken out of the social context and am extra vulnerable – and naked. But I purge my interiors and make the time in them as indeterminate as possible, just as I mix several styles from several decades together to take them out of the specific time in which the picture is painted.”

Why do you never paint people?

“I can’t work so openly as I do now when I paint people, because then I feel it’s all devoted to and fixed on an unambiguous narrative. If I wanted to portray people, it would have to be in a film.”

Why do you have to paint? What does painting really mean to you, and where do you dream it’s leading you?

“Painting to me is like keeping an expanded diary. My motifs are familiar and yet suitably alien, and viewers can interpret them on many levels. There’s a simplicity and straightforwardness to painting. I can just go round the corner and buy 500 kroner’s worth of materials and get going with the white canvas. It’s freedom, and I love to create a new room and provide a space for a new drama. I have gradually constructed my own alphabet. But to answer your last question, I hardly have any dreams any more. The most important thing for me is to have a quite ordinary day in my studio. Another day in the office, alternation between the slow oil paintings and the rapid paper works and my art books.”

Adam Saks shows me his art books. They are made on many different kinds of paper, and they constitute a small, portable exhibition in book form.

“I mix computer drawings, monotypes, hand drawings, paper clip ornaments and body tattoos in the books. It’s a catalogue of ideas containing my “alphabet”. The books are the lowest part of the visual food chain that ends in the paintings. The various techniques mimic each other and nourish each other.”

Lisbeth Bonde holds the degree of cand. mag. and writes on art in the weekly newspaper Weekendavisen. She has written the books Artists in Conversation (2002), Studio – the Artist’s Workshop (2003), Solo – a Monograph on Peter Martensen (2006), and together with Mette Sandby she will in September 2006 also be publishing a book entitled Manual to Contemporary Danish Art.

Blazing Recall

Upon completing his third year at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, the twenty-two year old Adam Saks moved to Berlin to continue his studies with Bernd Koberling at Akademie der Künste.

He brought along three years of experience from the most theoretical and practice-oriented art academy in Scandinavia.

It was in Berlin that I first became acquainted with Saks. I was immediately struck by the intelligence and independence of his work. Here was a young artist of irrefutable authority with broad minded and inquisitive approach to the traditions and practices of painting. In addition to this, a private robust mythology formed the basis for his narratives: the French Foreign Legion and its role in places such as Guyana and other “exotic” spots.

What I first noticed was how he fully utilized the paint’s capacity to render light and darkness, moods and figures, and, in short, to present landscapes and populate them.

A method unique to Saks is the way he incorporates the graphic technique of monotype to his paintings. Using black color emulating a form of handwriting, he paints characters that resembles faces architecture or other artifacts on a pane of glass and subsequently presses the pane on to the canvas. In another instance he might turn the brush using the handle to scrape signs into the wet paint. This allows for a discontinuous, fragmentized space grafted with abstractions, linguistic undertones and markers separated by time, all within the larger context of the picture surface. The painting becomes a diverse and complex landscape of remarkable beauty, riddled, however, with ominous undercurrents hinting at a struggle for survival where something previously undisturbed and homogeneous now faces an unexpected and disruptive threat.

A source of enjoyment during my years in Berlin was my recurring visits to Adam Saks’ studio and our discussions concerning his work in progress. It was here that I sensed that the underlying story of the French Foreign Legion was not simply about colonialism and the problematic foundations upon which western prosperity is based, but also the dream of something paradisiacal and completely different. This constant companion of civilization critique can also be seen as a metaphor for Saks’ artistic approach. A risky enterprise that involves breaking ties, burning bridges, and establishing a completely new identity.

Through the urgency of his narrative and practice, Adam Saks securely positions himself among the more prominent Nordic painters of his generation.

Fruvik, February 2005

Björn Springfeldt