Art criticism by the journalist Paul Nielsen 1994

By Paul Nielsen, Horsens Newspaper

Promising exhibition by Henrik Saar
Horsens - Henrik Saar, only 27 years old, is on the artistical level a complex human being.
He may feel afflicted with anxiety and melancholy, but he can also work his way out of all this and make the light in his mind break out.
Now he exhibits - as one of the first times in his life - in the Workshop Gallery in Horsens - and here you will be introduced to a talent,  to whom there is all possible reason having high expectations.
Henrik Saar prefers the technique of transparent painting. He starts painting yellow, green, and red on the canvas. Then he paints thin layers of brown layers upon layer and layers, and the final results are some coloristically lightning effects. It's a method demanding both patients and virtuous, and the young painter has come far.
But in this process, it must be clear to him all the time, how the motif shall appear. His whole world of thoughts is - as the exhibition clearly shows - activated. The result is some frankly spoken breathtaking pictures with good content. It counts, for instance, the painting: "My Peruvian wife." Here he has managed to place her between two cultures - The ancient Peruvian materialized in two riders - and the "throw-away culture" emerged by the discarded electrical stow. Excellent!
Notify his picture: "Melancholy" as well. It tells about the winding roads of life, where a man pulls a wagon from the darkness toward the light. 

Opus one - Oil on canvas  114 x 116 cm.

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1989 - A leap into a unpredictable life as a visual artist

Inspired by a fascination with the American satire magazine MAD's illustrator Don Martin's drawings and the Danish Caricature artist Roal Als. Seven years of work at my father's architect's studio, studies of right-wing extremism during world war II and the French Revolution, the breakdown of the Berlin wall, Nietzches delirious speech about the death of God, Freud's dream interpretation, Salvador Dalí's surrealistic universe, Kierkegaard's existentialistically concept of irony, and concept of Anxiety, poetry by the Danish author Thorkild Bjørnvig, Mozart's opera Don Juan, and Pink Floyd's musical interpretation of reality, in 1989, I burned all the bridges behind me. I jumped into life with the red soft forms of insecurity - into life as a full-time painter. In the beginning, I painted everything with a wide paintbrush. Soft shapes. Without much detail, and to my surprise, the painting became my soul mirror, each time revealing my Anxiety. The basic form of these soft forms of Anxiety comes from a cartoon smiley that I developed up through the 80s for diligent use as graffiti and on all surfaces that could be drawn on. As I start painting, the smile suddenly turns into a scream, and if one were to sound my early pictures, Pink Floyd's "The big gig in the sky" would be very appropriate. 

When you click on the picture you wil be lead to my youtube channel, currently with 26 videos from different times showing and telling about my art.