Reality is an aesthetic affair
Interview with the artist Peter Martensen by Carsten Odgaard
English translation W.Glyn Jones

Peter Martensen (b. 1953) is someone so out-of-date that he makes portraits of people. At a time when the human figure has been as good as exiled from the world of art, Martensen has stubbornly retained it as an inexhaustible theme. His figure paintings show clear evidence of inspiration from classical figure painting, and in the tone, the subdued and consciously limited use of colour, we also sense an echo from Vilhelm Hammershøi’s portraits of women turning away from us in empty rooms. But in relation to the classical portrait and figure painting, an idiosyncratic feature has crept into Martensen’s paintings in that the human figure is devoid of all individual human personality. His figures are anonymous; their features are almost the same everywhere. These are modern average everyday human beings, most often equipped with a white shirt, black tie, black trousers, black shoes and a nice, neat parting at the side.

These figures play the main part in Martensen’s paintings. Either as an individual being or as an isolated mass being, a clone among other clones. The clones might well point to each other in recognition, but they can never create human contact in a modern world that alienates the individual. It might sound a bit like moralising, but as viewers of Martensen’s paintings we are forever faced with a relativism that throws the meaning back on the person seeing. Doubt is placed in the foreground, for to Martensen that is always a greater stimulus than certainty. So we often sit viewing the pictures with a sense of nagging doubt. Is the important element not outside the frame of the picture? Has the central event the picture deals with and takes as its essential theme not taken place, or is it about to take place? And even this uncertainty with which the “empty” and “neutral” rooms in the pictures confront us is often a rather disturbing and uncomfortable acquaintance. But nevertheless an acquaintance that gets under our skin and fixes itself in our bodies in the form of strong, imperative and unforgettable images.

Carsten Odgaard: There has been talk in literature in recent years of the return of realism, of an increasing focus on and interest in reality and personal experience. How do you relate to concepts such as ‘realism’ and ‘reality’?

Peter Martensen: At the beginning of the 1970s, neo-realism, photo-realism or extreme realism, as it was also called, came into prominence in the USA. I had just entered the Academy, and on a visit to the USA in 1972 I saw examples of the new trend, which had quite an overwhelming effect on me at that time. The predominant modernist painting seen otherwise had reached minimalism in the deconstructionist phase– and alongside this there was still plenty of abstract impressionism. I didn’t understand neo-realism because my starting point was the textural, expressive painting seen for instance in Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud.
On the basis of photographic models the photorealists took reproduction to the limit. The surface of the painting – the colour was often applied with an airbrush – was completely devoid of structure, so the painting became like a pane of glass in which you saw the motif. This search for virtuosity, and the preoccupation with formal reproduction, has not bequeathed many interesting works to posterity. They simply lacked brilliancy.
The word “realism”, of course, originally covered an artistic movement that dominated the art and literature of the mid-19th century. But it is used in quite an arbitrary manner today for works that make use of representation in one way or another. I myself don’t use the expression “figurative art” in that connection. My fundamental view of what is called “reality” is fairly transcendent. Taught by atomic physics’ astounding images of the world in which concepts such as matter, particle fluctuations, acceleration and time are the dynamic basis of which we are physically and consciously part, I can scarcely distinguish between what we call dead and live matter. I experience the world as a completely coherent– though inconceivably complex – entity like an infinite sequence of events that interact on just as infinite a number of levels. Mankind’s possibility of finding its bearings is based on our mentally forming a scene that in purely concrete terms is situated within what we call our field of vision. We act on this stage, and this stage acts as an “image” when we are to pass on experiences and occurrences to each other. Human access to the world is to a high degree determined by a dependence on images, both in perception and also in our ordinary everyday information. The way in which we deal with and analyse images includes our relating to patterns. This relating to patterns is taking place all the time on every plane – not only a visual plane. And here aesthetics enter the picture. So fundamentally I believe that “reality” is an aesthetic affair. But in my role as a human being, a fellow to others, I all the time have to adjust this approach from a moral point of view. This constant dialogue between the aesthetic and the moral takes place with the image as a connecting link. The image becomes the screen, which like a television picture gathers the threads together and can contain the paradoxes. Pictorial art acts on these premises, but it also has its own history and formation as a point for discussion.

Would you describe your own paintings as “realistic”, and in what way?
Over the years, I have given the name of “mental realism” to the realism in which I work. A picture is primarily a mental space. A matter of the mind – just as an object becomes when perceived by the eye. The sculptor Willy Ørskov wrote two good books on these relationships (Interpreting Objects, 1966, and Objects, 1972).

Couldn’t the term “traumatic realism” also be a suitable description? I am thinking here too of the fact that you often seek out historical material, which you then adapt and give artistic form. This is true, for instance, of your series of “trial pictures”, in which the Nuremberg trial is used as a motif.

I don’t actually like the term “traumatic realism”. It really narrows the concepts down. Ambiguity is an important factor in my works. I can accept that the traumatic has a certain part to play in the mental material, but much of my painting is in a pre-traumatic phase if we are at all to take up a position on that concept…. Although I have often felt in my work that my personal crises have had a certain part to play in my choice of motif and expression, I am nevertheless very conscious that the image as object is a sovereign area that should not be burdened with personal crises or narrow ideological or psychological notions that can easily be decoded. It would be contrary to my understanding of the exceptional potential of the image as a metaphor for the inexpressible. I also reject the idea that I am a prophet of doom or an apathetic observer of either the degeneration of disintegration of civilisation. I simply try to create images representing syntheses of many different contexts that are then boiled down into a very concentrated “sauce” – and so neither can I accept the idea that the traumatic should have pride of place … the poetry is the bay leaf in my casserole, if we are to stay with this awkward metaphor!

Why just the Nuremberg trial?
I was born in the shadow of the Second World War, that is to say only eight years after the war finished. The awareness of it and its atrocities was present throughout my childhood – not because any of my own family had been directly affected by the events, but because people talked about it, and especially the unimaginable atrocities carried out by the nazis were the subject of amazement and horror. My father had a catalogue from an exhibition of photographs from all over the world called The Family of Man. They were some of the best photos from that time and included pictures of the concentration camps. As a little boy I was fascinated by this catalogue. I think by studying these pictures I learnt a great deal about the world in a very short time.
I saw a television broadcast about the Nuremberg trial at the beginning of the 90s. I photographed direct from the screen and used my photos as the starting point for various attempts at photocopying, enlarging and painting. The picture of these accused men and their judges was an icon for me. An image of both hope and catastrophe. At the same time, they were rather like a series of spectator pictures I had made over the preceding years. The picture had its own logic. That is quite important to me. I have a problematic relationship to the “determined” portrayal. That is to say the view that there is one specific intention in painting the picture, which can then be decoded by the viewer. One must understand that the strength of painting is precisely that it is at a significant distance from language and very close to the senses; it is pre-linguistic and therefore contains far more information, much of it difficult to put into words. Therefore I have also to agree with the German painter Gerhard Richter when he ways: “my pictures are wiser than I.”

How do you otherwise work with historical fact? Do you seek to produce a “true representation”?

I think of the picture as a field of opportunity. Painting is “historical” by nature. So the historical references are part of the picture’s own reservoir, which I find it difficult to avoid. If painting is to have any relevance at all today, it must again incorporate the body and therefore the pain spots. The aesthetic discourse has to take a path through the whole nervous system and not, as used to be the case, be based on strategic and theoretical considerations of aesthetics alone.
I once had an idea of a kind of “true representation”. It was a kind of work that incorporated every bright idea and registered every association I had had, and in the finished picture the whole genesis of the picture could be followed from start to finish. This form of picture is about some inner images that have to emerge in as true and unencumbered a way as possible. So no construction. I have since realised that this very thought was itself a construction.
Today, I am more concerned with whether my paintings act as images. Although in recent years I have made more use of newspaper photographs and television stills as starting points for my paintings, I have throughout only used images that reflected my own innermost feelings, and I have never been interested in reproducing exactly what I have seen. I think of newspaper photographs as a kind of rough sketch that I moderate and on the basis of which I re-create. Towards the point where the painting is both a painting and an image.
My attitude to painting is that there is a kind of rhythmical and textural “beauty” present that can only support the motif.

Your paintings are most often non-narrative and frighteningly silent. Nothing really happens – and yet one feels a dense, tense atmosphere that is laden with meaning. I can’t help thinking of Hammershøi’s empty rooms when I come across your paintings. On top of that, to my mind you have a great deal in common with Preben Fjederholt (1955-2000). In a different context, you have used the expression “the neutral” of your artistic method. What does that term imply?

I use “the neutral” as a point of orientation in my work. That is to say neutrality in relation to colour, motif and, in the earlier works from the 90s, also composition, where I worked on the basis of the idea of a non-hierarchical form of composition in which every part of the picture was equally important.
To me, the “inspired”, deeply emotional approach to painting is in reality an ideal, but only an ideal. For I find it difficult to realise that kind of “blind” expressionism – at least at the present moment. I have to take many a roundabout path, for instance via a large number of generalisations, in order to reach the “almost nil point” from which everything can happen. Incidentally, I reserve the right not to know why that is so.

Which artists, apart from those you have mentioned, do you feel most closely related to? One senses a love of classical figure painting. Does your inspiration come from contemporary artists as well?
I shall never stop admiring classical figure painting with Caravaggio, Velazquez and Goya as the leading exponents. But my inspiration over the last ten years has come mainly from films, photos and the stage, but also from contemporary art. Mark Tansey opened my eyes to the monochrome narrative painting at the beginning of the 80s. Lucian Freud’s pastose, sensuous painting has influenced my attitude to colour. Then there are Eric Fischl’s very straightforward portrayals of people, and R.B. Kitaj’s strange, anecdotal images. These artists have all been of great significance to me. The Danish painter Freben Fjederholt was the person with whom I felt most on a wavelength. We carried on an intensive dialogue about painting, which unfortunately came to an end when he died in 2000.