Heaven and hell

By journalist Tine Winther

Henrik Saar shows existential artworks

in Gallery Estfelt - Horsens

By Journalist Tine Winter

Despair, emptiness, forfeiture, and desperation. Henrik Saar has used the gloomy brush for the exhibition: "Heaven and hell."

The 36 years old Teacher-educated Henrik Saar from Fredericia has been a painter since he was at the beginning of the 20ties. He is relatively self-taught through established artists, who taught him both in Denmark and Peru, from where his wife comes.

The Saar style demands space because the expression is hugely expressive.

In my life, as in my art, I am an existentialist, and thus I work in themes like freedom, anxiety, and despair. Existentialism doesn't manifest in any steady form; that's why the expression may change for each picture. There is no place for resting either in a pictorial manner nor in life itself, and that's why each painting is a new painting in any sense, explains Henrik Saar.

Stone Age emptiness

The most remarkable painting, which Henrik Saar has given the title, "Stone age romanticism," is made in the impasto technique and imagines a little boychild in a petrified wood with a ball in his hands.

Existentialism describes the empty and dense atmosphere. The boy has a ball in his hands, but there is no one to receive the ball. It's the image that I like most — inspired by a photo of my first steps in 1968, where I was able to start walking - Here on my way out in the emptiness/life, explains Henrik Saar.

"Inferno - Verse no. 13," inspired by "The divine comedy" by Dante, imagine two old ladies walking in a horrible and gloomy wood. I wish you interpret me as an expressive figurative artist with my propper style and the world where I express myself.

Despairing process

"Spiritual hymn," imagine a singing monk with a branch in his hands, sitting kneeled in a centrifugal universe without nowhere to hold.

I make my paintings due to processes and are just about a despairing process. Despair is the driving force because one tries to repair what went wrong yesterday. By continuing working on the painting is to get out of the despairing feeling the artwork brought you in yesterday. During that process, the image develops until you reach a level or a form that you never would arrive at in a comfortable, logical way.

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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.