La Nuit américaine

Here comes the woman in the red dress, promenading with a small dachshund past the newspaper vendor on the square. She passes the entrance to the subway with its well-known, twining Parisian Art Nouveau portal, where people pour up from the underground. In the crowd, we see a well-dressed young man come up from the metro – he reminds us at first sight of the French film director Francois Truffaut. The young man crosses the square diagonally onto the opposite pavement, where he meets another well-dressed but older gentleman. The young man stops in front of the older man and slaps his face. SLAP!

Here comes the woman in the red dress, promenading with a small dachshund past the newspaper vendor on the square. She passes the entrance to the subway with its well-known, twining Parisian Art Nouveau portal, where people pour up from the underground. In the crowd, we see a well-dressed young man come up from the metro – he reminds us at first sight of the French film director Francois Truffaut (but he is too young). The young man crosses the square diagonally onto the opposite pavement, where he meets another well-dressed but older gentleman. The young man stops in front of the older man and slaps his face. SLAP.

La Nuit américaine (Day For Night) is the title of a film by Francois Truffaut from 1973, the first scene of which I describe above. The scene is repeated, because it was not perfect the first time. In the film – which essentially is about a man named Francois Truffaut who makes a film about a man named Francois Truffaut – we both watch the film that we see being made, while at the same time we watch the lives and work of the actors, technicians and director making the film. As so often in French cinema, but especially in Truffaut’s art, it’s all about love, and in the film it quickly turns out that the love that develops during the filming is at least as dramatic as the love that the film deals with.

The film’s title, La Nuit américaine, refers to a technical term in French cinema in which you film during the day, and then, using a special lighting and type of film, make it look as though it were night. And now, in April 2017, La Nuit américaine is also the title of an exhibition by the artist Ivan Andersen, in which two of the works also bear the same title as the film.

In all art, repetition is a basic condition. There is no musician who has not practised scales over and over again, or a writer who has not had to repeat and rewrite, erase and write again. An actor must repeat lines innumerable times in order to memorise them, and to make it sound “as though it were being said for the first time”. But a painter’s repetitions and revisions usually take place in a somewhat different way. You occupy more or less the same position in front of the canvas every day, but you do not play scales or learn anything by heart. However, each picture leads up to or over to the next one, so you train and improve in the work while the picture is being created. On the canvas there is always a unique ‘now’, and if it does not work, you must delete it, start over and create another unique ‘now’.

Most genres of art thus work with repetitions to create presence, and in most cases the artist must practise in order to be able to create something that looks spontaneous and immediate. Can you practise being spontaneous? In Ivan Andersen’s case it seems that he devotes large amounts of time to quietly working with many different types of paint application so as to create an immediate and painterly “NOW”.

Ivan Andersen’s new works are perfectly framed, both with the film title and the technical terminological explanation. For if, on the one hand, we closely examine Ivan Andersen’s paintings, it is like taking part in the actual process of creation, in the same way as when we watch the making of Truffaut’s film. On the other hand, with his latest works Ivan Andersen has undergone an artistic transformation by placing his work under brand-new lighting – indeed, almost a formula, which may be reminiscent of the La Nuit américaine technique.

In the new works, Ivan Andersen has completely wiped the slate clean of the violent and dramatic motivic clashes which he has in the past used so diligently in a both virtuoso and surprising way. The artist’s attraction to collage has been palpable and visible, and the attraction of the exploded pictorial space has prevailed in the vast majority of his painterly productions.

But now, the motifs of the pictures are suddenly much more simple, transparent and straightforward than they were previously. Indeed, they might almost seem a bit trivial and perhaps even undramatic in their clear simplicity – but you sense immediately that there is something disturbing in this all-too-clear lucidity, because I do not quite know where I should look. The simple motif of the picture does not really tell us anything that we can latch on to – it is apparently quickly over, and you dither a bit in uncertainty about what it is you are supposed to look at. After a while, however, it is as though you look beyond the motifs in all their simple banality: a man on a horse, a man in a doorway, a landscape, a forest lake, etc. The eye must move further, or deeper, into the pictures. In fact, perhaps the eye needs to get right down into the picture, almost like an archaeological dig.

No-one who knows Ivan Andersen would believe that his paintings have become simpler, more understandable or readable simply because the motifs have become more isolated. But something is missing here, and that is the story – or rather, the stories – that flew through Ivan Andersen’s previous works, criss-crossing and slapping together in a myriad of carefully-constructed pictorial collisions.

The stories now lie right behind the motifs, and you have to go right up close to the painting to see that they lie fully unfolded down in the colour technique. They may be slightly more abstract stories than we have previously witnessed, but they are nonetheless highly concrete. In this way, Ivan Andersen’s paintings suddenly become intimate, and it is like having a personal conversation with the paintings as you closely study the many layers of paint. The manner in which the layers of paint arose and were obtained is frequently obscure, as Ivan Andersen is quite unorthodox in how he applies paint to a canvas or wooden panel. Strange clashes arise between figuration and technical expressions, and suddenly, it’s clear: Ivan Andersen has not rejected ‘collage-thinking’ – he has just moved down into the colour technique and the perception of texture and nuance. The collage is expressed in brushstrokes, printed colours with plastic covering and other unhandy ways of dealing with oil and acrylic paints, because this is how Ivan Andersen creates shapes, space, time and movement – or in other words, narrative. Ivan Andersen thinks in colours and with colours. His technically equilibristic treatment of colour has always been visible, including in the earlier, collage-like paintings, but in the new works the colour treatment has been allowed to sing out clearly, as a vital and independent way to create a pictorial narrative.

The word ‘collage’ is originally French, and means “to glue together”. As a technique, collage has been used by the Chinese since around the year 200 BC, when texts and hand-painted pictures were pasted together. Today, we know collage mainly from the works of Picasso and Braque, but both Surrealists and Dadaists also used newspaper pictures, wallpaper scraps, wrapping paper, etc., to create new ways of seeing pictures. In the 60s and 70s, Robert Rauschenberg began creating giant collages by screen printing on canvas in whole, continuous surfaces. Later, the concept of collage has spread to virtually all genres of art, including film, theatre, music and literature, for example as a cut-up technique. In most cases, collage has been used to rupture a continuous narrative or musical sequence by, so to speak, ‘gluing’ elements the ‘wrong’ way together, and thereby enabling the creation of a new artistic whole.

In Ivan Andersen’s new La Nuit américaine paintings, the forms are also exploded from the inside, but in a much more organic and restrained way than before, and it is as though his colour collage thinking now rather collects, condenses and concentrates the pictures.

In the idyllic landscape painting Rollespil (‘Role play’), we can really see this clash between motif, painting technique and title. In a forest or park-like lake landscape, the lake in the foreground seems almost as though it may dissolve the whole picture into a kind of psychedelic wave where everything seems to be something completely different to what you first thought. The sky looks like a piece of retro 70s wallpaper, the trees in the distance are almost animal-like in their pale reddish flesh and skin tones, while other trees seem to be painted like a rough rock in sunshine. All of the bushes and trees are completely detached from each other, painted with different techniques, as though many different universes are colliding at once in the relatively few square centimetres that this canvas occupies in the world. If we move into the bushes, we find that they are not painted in a particularly bush-like fashion. The paint may serve as a ‘bush’, but it could also be much more. Everything has been worked out, re-painted, reconsidered, worn down and built up again, stylishly and with confidence of form. You sense a large laboratory or machine park with grinders, spray paint, etc., behind these – at first glance – simple images. Ivan Andersen is at once both classical and unorthodox in his choice of materials and his treatment of colour. On the one hand, we see classic oil on canvas, with wax and varnish used to process the picture, just as we have known it since the Middle Ages, while the manner of grinding down the many different layers appears to be of a rougher, handcrafted, contemporary and mechanical character, carried out with abrasive discs. You get the feeling of something that needs to be over and done with; there is speed in the picture, even though everything is standing still.

Where Claude Monet’s water lily pictures are mainly about the creation of light and reflection, Ivan Andersen’s pictures are about the creation of time and awareness of the pictorial medium.

The painting Rollespil (‘Role play’) refers both to the fact that some people like to dress up in the woods and play out various scenes from books and films, and to the fact that the painting itself may be perceived as being something other than itself – it puts on a mask and keeps its secrets close. This picture plays at being something other than it is, and when you delve into the details, you discover just how many ‘times’ there are in it. The actual execution and processing is one aspect of time, while another is the mixture of retro time and stylistic elements, and then we have the frozen time of the film world in the painting Blue Screen.

In Topography, Ivan Andersen introduces us to painting mountains. Not paintings that depict mountains, but mountains made of paintings, and which as such act as a mountain illusion. A painted canvas is made up on a frame and then shaped like mountains, mounted on a nine or ten-edged table top. The canvas suddenly looks real when it is shaped in three dimensions. We are at once brought back to La Nuit américaine, in which the film plays at making a film. Here, the painting plays at being a mountain (or at least a model mountain). It is hard not to associate it with model train landscapes with papier-mâché mountains and small human figures, as we have seen them in railway stations.

But this mountain landscape refers just as much to creased canvases as to model trains, so that the viewer is constantly forced to choose between the real, empty canvas and the mountain illusion. And if we move up to the top of the mountain, we stand once again on the empty white canvas, completely cleansed and empty, and ready for a new mountain, a new house, a new landscape to be painted again. A new mountain can be painted, a new house, a new landscape can be painted again.

By the artist Jesper Christiansen