Cristian Andersen — À propos — Slash Paris

Cristian Andersen has long liked to play with dread. Dreadful cataclysms or dreadful chaos form his horizon. Chiaroscuro sets the tone for all his work, giving his installations a kinship with the prints of Jacques Callot. Fragmentation of form becomes a kind of rule. But these forms are repeated from one piece to another, from one support to another. That totally leafless bit of blackened tree in the installation Colonisation (2007), merely a feeble branch extended by a nailed plank, appears in almost identical form, albeit with geometrical, triangular parts, in the series of drawings Blüten aus Asche (2005), or in the photograph Alte Geistehundefalle (2003). The axes may turn up as wax objects in the middle of an installation, or as ball-pen drawings set in a Dantean landscape. Likewise, rays of light cut through the darkness of the image as a door opens ( Get The Balance Right, 2007) or, lightning-like, rend the surface of canvases covered with latex ( Broken Minute Later, 2006-2007). While fragmentation is part of Cristian Andersen’s self-imposed rule, it works visually only because the artist combines it with one key condition: equilibrium. His works play constantly on this duality, as if on a fixed point in time. Faced with them, or in the middle of his installations, we stand in the aftermath of a cataclysm, but just before a breaking point. The question of time is key to understanding his work, for it is materialised by this equilibrium: witness the drops falling from the ceiling in Draft, (2005), or slipping from the finger in As Long As It Takes (2007).