Flashers and Blondes

In Peter Røssel's paintings, flashers, blondes, crooked bunnies, dogs in fabrics, and sausages on a walk collide. Figures in striped pajamas are spiced up with speech bubbles, "graffiti tags," and snappy advertising slogans. These are images that send you into chaotic, fragmented spaces on a hunt for meaning and coherence. But the big, underlying message remains elusive.

The various elements of the paintings pull in many directions, and this often gives the impression of misdirection—precisely because something that seems to mislead might actually point to a greater meaning.

In his latest exhibition at Stalke Galleri, Røssel has honed and refined his expression. He focuses on the relationship between form and language, also playing with familiar figures and well-known clichés. These take on a pre-established role while simultaneously being reinterpreted.

The works are caricatures of Røssel’s view of the world and humanity at large, yet with a sense of both humor and melancholy. His works try to convey a pictorial language for adults that requires time and engagement.

Visual Jokes
Neither Croné nor Røssel view the world as a whole. Instead, they direct our experience of reality into opaque and complex images with ambiguous meanings and multilayered forms of expression.

These are images full of visual jokes, where Croné’s animals and Røssel’s distorted figures appear as some kind of slapstick comedy. In Croné’s case, there is a touch of melancholy, while Røssel’s caricatures are brought closer to reality with phones, urinals, and toys. Meanwhile, Croné’s ping-pong table of fragmented mass media images delivers peculiar and surprising situations that turn things upside down. These, along with their fragmented and dissolved pictorial expressions, reflect a general cultural state.

Malene La Cour Rasmussen

JPK

Pop Revisited

Since the emergence of pop art in the USA in the 1960s, mass culture has been a significant theme in visual art. Art reflects and comments on everyday life and the reality encountered through media, advertisements, and popular culture. This is also true of Peter Røssel’s paintings, although it would be too one-sided to view his art merely as an extension of pop art.

Røssel works with a visual language that formally takes its starting point in the comic universe, while simultaneously drawing inspiration from various other sources. His paintings are often filled to the brim with different signs and figures and can, among other things, be seen as a reflection of the multitude of impressions intersecting in the cultural information flow of the time.

At the new exhibition at Stalke Galleri, Røssel presents an impressive amount of new paintings as well as an installation. The latter emphasizes a connection between the personal and the public space—a duality also found in many of the paintings through their layering of different levels of both private and generally recognizable references.

However, not all the paintings work with a fragmented accumulation. A group of them stands out from the rest, both due to their panel-like, narrow vertical format and their simpler expression. These works seem to suggest that the artist is exploring new directions in his examination of art's potential to reflect the visual culture of the time.

Kristine Kern

Politiken