Søren Martinsen is a Danish painter with a very analytical artistic point of view. Most of his works revolve around the idea of landscape, which he often processes in a very clear and detail-oriented way. In the paintings, one can see almost a dissection of a landscape, which sometimes results in an image that is so analytical that the concrete aspect of it seems to disappear. In a way, enters the viewed landscape and looks at its DNA, which lies beneath the surface.
To discover more about his thoughts and process, we asked Søren a few questions, which he was very kind to answer. Read our interview below!
How did you know you wanted to be a painter and how did you become one?
Søren Martinsen: Since childhood, I always knew that I wanted to do something related to drawing and painting. I was working as an apprentice in an animation workshop which was fun, but I felt somehow I needed a more individual type of expression. So, I quit that job and I went on a long journey to the USA, Nicaragua and Mexico in my early twenties, and when I came back, a lot of my friends had started doing art, and so I also applied for art school too and got in. From then on I was just hooked.
Who were your main inspirations in art?
Søren Martinsen: Some of my early inspirations were the classic avant-garde artists that you could see in museums, like Picasso and the cubists, and surrealists like Dali and De Chirico. But later on, a lot of my inspiration came from film and early video art : Bruce Nauman, Kenneth Anger, Vito Acconci… And visually and formally I have always liked American minimalism and land art because of its grandeur, size and power it possessed. But really, I was inspired by everything I saw as a young artist, and especially all the exciting stuff my friends were doing on the art scene in Copenhagen and around Europe was very inspirational to me.
What themes do you prefer to touch on in your works and why?
Søren Martinsen: During the later years, I have concentrated my efforts to question and examine the notion we have of landscape. Landscape painting is the traditional expression of this, and my ambition is to take that genre above and beyond its historical provenance and earlier styles to a new level where it speaks of contemporary concerns about landscape, like ecology and the human footprints on every aspect of nature and the world.
Your works seesaw between rather representational and abstract. Why is that?
Søren Martinsen: Actually, my work is almost always representational or figurative, if you will. I am not so comfortable with pure abstraction, because I feel a need to have my motives connected somehow to the real world and its concerns. I can enjoy pure abstraction but do not feel that it delivers enough of a message in my own work. But often a lot of my artistic expression borders on the abstract because I deal with figuration in a pretty free way. For example, my probably most abstract-looking works are actually concrete landscapes that I grab from satellite surveillance photos like Google Earth and work on, and through a process of stylization, simplification and alterations, it ends up looking very abstract or non-figurative, but can always be traced back to a concrete spot on Earth.
You have also worked with video. How has that experience been different from painting and why did you approach it?
Søren Martinsen: Mainly, I enjoy the big difference in the amount of information you can convey in a painting and in a video, and therefore I often use both, even in the same show. They are not often used together, but I find that since the two mediums fundamentally different, they can be used as counterpoints and “developers” for each other, making experiencing both richer. The painting is a still image, chosen to make its impression as it is and stays, and the composition and details become very refined and deliberate in order to make a lasting mark. The videos unfold over time and have the ability to communicate longer, more complex storylines and advanced ideas, and they of course can also involve sound. As my approach is often quite “documentary” in the videos, they often contain quite a lot of information and themes, and this I have found to work pretty well together with the “frozen” and maybe more vibrant and poetic painting as a counterpoint.
Thank you!
For more of Søren Martinen’s works, go to sorenmartinsen.com