Press Release

The photographer and visual artist Per Bak Jensen will present the exhibition Gennemstrejf (Glimpses) at Stalke Gallery from September 19 to October 16.

The exhibition consists of 30 photographs divided into two rooms. In the first room, nine large color photographs (90 x 116 cm) are displayed, depicting various locations from Denmark, England, France, Italy, and the USA. Accompanying these images are nine small black-and-white photographs (30 x 30 cm), which are a series of close-ups from a gravel road in South Zealand.

In the second room, a series of color photographs featuring ivy and a number of still-life compositions of wilted flowers, feathers, bark, and mushrooms are on display. These new images represent Per Bak Jensen's perspective on the world. As in the artist’s earlier exhibitions, at first glance, we see a series of seemingly mundane images of a recognizable world. Upon closer inspection, however, these images reveal an underlying, insistent pattern — life and its transience — that reaches out to us, the passersby.

What stands out most in these images, as in life itself, is that they are imbued with a tone that touches us and causes us to change. As an attempt to outline a possible entry point to this exhibition, the artist has summarized the following short manifesto, explaining his motivations and current position:

Glimpses
"Over time, my mind in solitude has developed an ability to detach itself from its anchoring in reason. In order not to lose my connection to the world, I pursue this mindset and briefly map, through my images, the areas that are passed through."
— Per Bak Jensen, 1998

Per Bak Jensen, who is a lecturer in photography at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, has had an extensive range of exhibitions and is represented in several museums both in Denmark and abroad.

In connection with the exhibition, a catalog will be published, which can be obtained by contacting the gallery.

Sincerely,
Stalke Gallery

Reviews

Where the World Becomes Enchanted Again

Per Bak Jensen amplifies vision with his meditative photographs. He is both a philosopher and a practitioner. With a special optical poetry, he generously returns reality to us.

PHOTOGRAPHY

In symbolism, the concept of synesthesia was used. It signified a state in which a sensory impression is transmitted via one sense (e.g., vision) and suddenly triggers another sense, such as hearing, so that the sensory areas overlap. The poet Sophus Claussen wrote about synesthesia in his literary essays, and the artist Ingbert Stuckenberg created paintings in which the lines of verse read: "To your eyes' duck music, in the twilight hour, we listened mournfully" (quoted from memory). In other words: A visual perception becomes imbued with an auditory one, and the experience ascends to a higher unity, transcends, and becomes "spiritual music."

A profound experience awaits when encountering Per Bak Jensen's new photographs. Per Bak Jensen is one of the most significant photographic artists we have in this country. He is a deeply religious and contemplative person, passionately engrossed in the composition of the world, finding his motifs in the most peculiar places. These locations possess a special aura or a "genius loci," which he successfully conveys through his photographs. He often uses extremely long exposures, adding a richness and sharpness to his photographs. Even the smallest details, when captured in the bright light of his images, appear as if seen through God's eyes. In this way, everything becomes a gift, worthy of a grateful gaze. Only when seeing the world, it seems Per Bak Jensen suggests, does it become truly real. He practices a kind of visual animism.

Two Paths
In his new photographs, he moves along two paths: one involves traveling with his camera. He finds motifs in various locations, such as Assisi, Avignon, Verona, Dijon, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, Winchelsea in England, and Arizona. The other involves finding motifs in his immediate surroundings in Western Zealand. Wherever he is, his entire sensory apparatus is attuned to deep wonder.

We find ourselves, with Per Bak Jensen, in a space of rediscovery, where the world becomes re-enchanted. Strangely, there are no people in his pictures. Instead, the locations seem to "populate" themselves, becoming personified and filled with presence before us. It is not just the place depicted in the photographs but something more profound that comes alive.

Symbolic Motifs and Subtle Color Harmonies. One of the images, a propeller photographed in Lucca, Italy, stands out. The photograph, measuring 60 x 80 cm as displayed in the gallery, is extraordinarily beautiful. It is one of those works one might wish to own and look at every day. Behind the three symbolic propeller blades, an evocative sky reaches upward, referencing Christ’s cross, the two thieves, or perhaps the Trinity. Mountains and a crisscrossing highway can also be glimpsed. We find ourselves in a “terrain vague,” a desolate and marginal area within civilization’s “non-places,” which here transforms into a mystical cult site. The area is fenced off with red latticework, adding another dimension of blood and flesh to the symbolic imagery.

Delicate color harmony

In Per Bak Jensen’s still-life photographs, motifs of decay are explored: nature’s fading, wilting, and growth cycles. Subtle color harmonies of pink, brown, and yellow emerge. Objects like rose petals, mushrooms, feathers, and other organic materials lie “in parade” against white paper, evoking wonder at their origins. These natural elements are elevated to abstract motifs. Among these still-life images are six close-ups of a fallen tree trunk titled “Ebra.” The musculature, texture, and hairy bark of the tree evoke endless visual experiences of this large and “dangerous” body.

The tree rests in a landscape of plowed fields and rolling hills, recalling abstract works by Mark Rothko or monochrome painters like Pierre Soulages. Per Bak Jensen’s Gennemstrejf opens the viewer’s mind to the marvel of the world. And that is no small feat.

Per Bak Jensen: Gennemstrejf

Stalke Gallery, Vesterbrogade 14A, basement, Copenhagen. Open Tuesday–Friday 1–5 PM, Saturday 11 AM–3 PM, until October 16. Catalog with a foreword by Bent Fausing is available for 150 kr.

By Lisbeth Bonde

Photographer Per Bak Jensen continues to explore the essence of places, but his motif repertoire has expanded significantly.

Presence

In principle, it is the goal of all photography to reach out to the viewer and sharpen our vision of ourselves and our place in the world. But these considerations seem particularly relevant in relation to Per Bak Jensen's photographs. They always depict some form of landscape, whether industrial or cultural. At first glance, they may seem empty, but they convey a strong sense of 'something' that resides in the motif. The title "The Essence of Places" speaks to this phenomenon, and his comprehensive retrospective book from 1993 reflects it well. While his early motifs might seem somewhat dull and recognizable, they convey a subtle longing for something greater — let’s call it a sense of belonging to the world we inhabit — which demands a viewer's openness and challenge of the conventional notions of shared reality and 'fills' the images with a nearly physical sense of presence.

"For me, art is a state of existence that one can enter and exit," he says in The Essence of Places, and this state has become a tool for him to convey a special view of the world, reinforced by the depth and detail of the images. It is no coincidence that his works represent the spiritual aspect of Danish art, though not in an ironic sense. Recently, his large exhibition "For the Future" at Arken demonstrated this, and now a new exhibition with 30 new photographs can be seen at Stalke Gallery.

In the first room, nine large-format color photographs from various locations around the world are displayed, including Verona, Los Angeles, Assisi, and Copenhagen. These places are devoid of people but show remarkable traces of life. A deserted carousel, whose blue paint matches a vibrant blue sky, and oddly covered stalls in a stubble field. Behind a hedge, an industrial extension of concrete contrasts with large dark barns. A decayed entrance to a chicken farm stands amidst high-voltage wires and lampposts.

The red fruits of the horizontal rows of plantation vegetation shine vividly. A frontal view of a tree trunk reveals an owl and a jeep resting nearby, among other indicators of life, such as a Turkish chair, a flamingo figure, and an antique clock. These are timeless images that hint at something else, something almost elusive; it might be interpreted as a sense of absence — and the photographer himself compares it to religious belief. Something has passed through these places, leaving a trace. Hence the title "Through the Site." It is a combination of near-monochromatic tones and ultra-sharp detail that reveals landscapes brimming with possibilities.

Where God might have wandered once, as he humorously states, Per Bak Jensen creates an open narrative between his compressed arrangements, allowing the images to reflect and reinforce each other.

In the adjacent room hangs a type of motif that we haven’t seen from him before, but which, upon closer examination, conveys the same unsettling sense of presence. Most fascinating are the photographs of the ancient bull Ebra. Per Bak Jensen has zoomed in close to this majestic animal’s skin, which becomes a surprisingly multifaceted landscape that stands and breathes. This can be seen in the slightly blurred fields of the macro focus. It may resemble an aerial view of a barren desert landscape but is at the same time immensely sensual, and one can almost sense the animal's warm breath and dangerously calm pulse. The bull, like the gravel road, is a tactile material pointing to something greater and more profound. These photographs are combined with highly aesthetic studies of plants, bark, and fungi set against a white background. They may remind one of Karl Blossfeldt’s meticulous plant studies from the 1920s or Irving Penn’s still lifes, perhaps even advertising photography. But I believe that Per Bak takes these delicate motifs as seriously as the evocative places he is so skilled at finding and showing us. Seen in conjunction with the pulsating animism in the bull images, they represent a kind of continuously living, still life — “stilleben” — in a dead nature — “nature morte” — reminding us of life’s transience, in the most straightforward sense. As different as they may be, and despite their polished delicacy being admittedly a bit challenging to grasp or attribute meaning to, they become part of an existential investigation into the fullness of time and human existence, which Per Bak’s entire visual universe expresses so strongly.

His images articulate a phenomenologically sensed presence of existence, an existential spirituality, and a strong romantic longing. However, they have never been marked by the nostalgia that is the flipside of longing. There has always been a “coolness” to his color images, akin to what we find in related American traditions like New Documentary Color or New Topography. These vanitas floral images, which we have previously encountered in an earlier version at an exhibition in Politiken’s foyer, hint at a more conceptual shift in his work. At least, this is one way to interpret them. They become an explicit acknowledgment that we are always already on our way toward death, which contains within it a plea for us to stop, perceive the world, and question its diverse and enigmatic mysteries before it is too late.

Per Bak Jensen: Through the Site. Stalke Gallery. Vesterbrogade 14 A. September 19 - October 16. Wed-Fri: 13-18, Sat: 11-15. Illustrated catalogue with text by Bent Fausing.

By Mette Sandbye

Access to Reality

Per Bak Jensen has roamed far and wide in his search for photographs that open the space between tangible reality and its metaphysical clothing. This has resulted in many human-empty places, where things take over the visual field and let their relationships tell the story of what it means to live in the world. For the first time in ten years, one can now see his exploration of the paths of reality on gallery walls—and there is exciting new work to see.

The exhibition suggests two paths: one familiar to those who have followed Per Bak Jensen’s depictions of the essence of places, and the other showing a new track into close-up studies.

The first path, as a bearing image, is literally thematized by small silver-toned black-and-white close-ups of a gravel road. A road that visibly leads nowhere specific but becomes a place of texture, gravel, twigs, and leaves. The edge of the road is cut off by the image’s frame, so we neither know its destination nor its direction. Up and down, however, become clear in the color images with which the small paths are juxtaposed. The sky rises here over monumental objects, simultaneously inaccessible or markedly defined: three bridge pillars behind a fence, a car under a cover, a closed amusement park, trees surrounding a leveled space, a flamingo behind a fence, and so on. In all the images, there are markedly defined fields that ignite a longing for transgression and immersion. Like all sacred places, there is something hidden.

It is here that the exhibition's first path crosses the second. The theme is the boundary of sight’s access to the world. The second path is expressed in two series of images, each pointing to a boundary in the spectrum of reality that photography can depict. In one series, a row of still lifes with clipped plants is laid flat on a white surface and presented in extremely fine-grained sharpness. In the other series, there are extreme close-ups of the hide of a bull, whose swelling movements create deep, dark chasms of blurred invisibility. One series shows clarity—near-perfect visibility of the still death—while the other series shows darkness, mystery, and overwhelming vitality. In the radical juxtaposition of the two series, there is a reflection on the fixed gaze, which kills what is seen, and the sensitive gaze, which, in its closeness, takes life into itself. In these super-close distances, the eyes must lower, letting the nose and skin take over. Even when one steps down to the level of a microscope, the same relationships of fixation, distance, and proximity apply.

But Per Bak Jensen is at his best on his first path, where he explores reality in its grand formats, where it is the place itself—not just the object or texture—that speaks of the secrets of reality.

Karsten  R.S.Ifversen

Information.2.10.1998