Majken Schultz — À propos — Slash Paris

Built with known elements brought together in an unusual manner Majken Schultz’s landscapes and fragments of nature represent parallel realities. Realities in the way that they describe components of our lives namely time, thoughts, souvenirs. Parallel in that they are invisible and immaterial, yet perceptible for us, they are located on another level of consciousness than the one we register and observe by looking, listening and touching. Luminous and beautiful with a form of naivety yet never banal these works seduce us in the same way as the web of a spider where the attraction is such that we end up trapped…obliged to reflect.

Hair, cracks, lines of the skin, leaves, feathers, drops, strata of earth and stone, water, mountains, trees, anatomic details… make-up the images where the laws of gravity have been suspended, where what is heavy has become light and what is fragile massive. Images in perspective, regularly lead symmetrically from a central starting point to form closed and calm circuits of their own significance and atmosphere. Faced with planes seemingly moving forward or backward, the gaze and perception seeks to rest as in front of a kaleidoscope or a Rorschach test. If not the construction is in deep perspective, a reminder of Renaissance painting landscapes seen at a distance with their somewhat unreel atmosphere.

The palette is fresh, but not aggressive with a warm tendency and the language graphical and supple. At times the fields of colour are replaced by a more naturalist treatment used to describe water surfaces, moon reflection, or a sky. These variations are employed with such mastery and freedom that one style naturally blends into the other, also reflecting the references to universes that the artist holds in particular fascination: cartoon and animation, psychedelic art, the tradition of Japanese landscape painting, or the fusionnal and organic qualities of Art Nouveau.

These thought snapshots, expression used by the artist, aim to locate the relation between interior and exterior, between reality and dream, imagination, between psychiatry and poetry through universes presented as standstill with no explanation. Titles are evocative — Moonlight left — Alone, together — Far, far down below — Running thoughts — thus are expressed sensations, feelings and memories, ambiguities and paradoxes as well as a desire to penetrate and render an account of an elsewhere which is quite there.

If hidden landscapes is the first exhibition of Majken Schultz (1977) in France, this young artist trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (Det kgl. danske kunstakademi, 2000-2006) has already participated in over twenty exhibitions notably a few museum exhibitions (Match race, Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, Aalborg, 2007 — Botanisk forvandling, Vejle Kunstmuseum, 2008) and in Danish public institutions (Kunstergruppen Selvsving, Galleri Overgaden, 2005 — Selvsving, Køge Skitsesamling, 2003)…