Kaspar Oppen-Samuelsen: I Warp and I Wait

Humans, animals, vegetation and landscapes converge and merge in Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen’s meditative tableaus on canvas. The compositions seem to be in constant flux.
Flowing. Metamorphing. Non-hierarchical. The works have their own otherworldly logic, mystical poetic pictorial narratives. Hybrid creatures, humans with animalistic features and animals conveying human sentiments seem to co-exist in tranquillity. Dependent on each other and the world they inhabit. The creatures are strangely familiar and timeless, as if they have always been around, but only now decided to emerge on the canvas before us.

Lakes of colourful pigments are juxtaposed with patches of raw canvas. Colours are freed from their logical connotations, repeated in the sky, an arm and a hoof, indicating that we all flow in and out of the same material. That we all exist on the same plane. The physical and metaphysical are becoming one. The landscapes are hyper local, sourced just outside Samuelsen’s rural barn studio in the west of Denmark. While the animals and humanoids that appear and disappear in the works have a dream like DNA. Fascinating creatures that carry themselves with an intriguing elegance. Often with their eyes closed, as if pondering existence, or simply just being here.

The new works in I Warp and I Wait play by their own rules. They are wonderfully autonomous. One has to accept the premise of the painting to engage with it. The works exist in the visual realm, beyond the rules of spoken language and narratives. Communicating by subtle means, suggestive, non-linear and intuitively associative. Open ended and continuously evolving with the viewer. They seem to flow through Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen, and while he gives them form, he doesn’t appear to direct them.

Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen was born in 1977 in Denmark. He holds a BFA in fine art and contemporary critical theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK and a MFA from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark. Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen has mounted solo and group exhibitions with Lundgren Gallery, Mallorca, Spain, Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg, Denmark, 15th edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, They Call Us The Screamers, curated by Matt Packer, Connacht Tribune Print Works, Galway, Ireland, O Chair O Flesh, Treignac Projet, Treignac, France and Politikens Forhal, Copenhagen, Denmark. Recent commissions include The Court of Eastern Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark and The Danish Immigration Service, Næstved, Denmark. His work has been acquired by public and private institutions and collections. I Warp and I Wait is Samuelsen’s second solo exhibition with V1 Gallery.