The Topography of Longing
On the disciplined human and the longing for freedom in the imagery of Peter Ravn
By Merete Sanderhoff, art historian and writer
"There is much more mystery in the shadow of a man walking on a sunny day, than in all the religions of the world.”
Giorgio de Chirico
Men are discreetly surveyed in Peter Ravn’s paintings. By the fly on the wall or clandestinely, without disturbing them or bringing them back to the orchestrated self-perception of reality. The subjects exist in their private rooms, self-absorbed and oblivious to the fact that they are being watched.
The prototype of the modern man, is the core motif in Ravn’s paintings. These men are pictured in situations where they let go of themselves and of control. They exist in an intimate and private room where nobody needs to act normal, being required only to be present in the now. They are uniform in the modern sense, dressed in what appears to be timeless suits and white shirts suggesting something very orderly and controlled, which has then lost it momentarily. To capture these pictures of the modern man’s elegies has been a lead motif for Ravn, since his relatively late debut as a painter in 2004. The modern man reveals himself occasionally, when seemingly unnoticed, in spite of the uniform and discipline. That’s where Ravn strikes. His gaze penetrates the modern man’s public facade and reaches into the private space, hiding behind the immaculate surface of the suit and testifies that the perceived order is just a delusion. That in reality there are people underneath with feelings, instincts, anxiety and aggression, traits which are normally suppressed by mutual consensus. He has a clandestine knowledge of what goes on under the surface and is capable of uncovering it. This exposure of the suffering behind the strict modernity is one of Ravn’s hallmarks.
To draw is a way of comprehending the world. Peter Ravn has drawn since boyhood and in his artistic practice he continues aiming his eye at the world, pursuing to penetrate moments of doubt, aggression and chaos, but also tenderness. Ravn masters the canvas, controlling colour and composition with an ease of craftmanship reminiscent of a calligrapher’s accumulated skill, or the ability of a pianist to add that extra something that cannot be written down, but is of crucial importance. The beauty – the obvious beauty existing within the inherent demands of the craft – arises as a consequence of this trained skill. His ability to see when the image is there lends a striking precision to his visual universe. He paints with the assured brush strokes of a sleepwalker, leaving an unmistakable impression, as well as a mark of singular control of his motif, for instance in works like Kneeman (2009) and Landfall (2018). As the painter with privileged access to the intimate scenes of these modern and unraveled men, Ravn takes on the role of the surveillance camera. While the men lose control, the painter maintains it. His observations become interesting and challenging, as they simultaneously leave behind an unsolved riddle: What set off this scenario, what pushed over the ruling order, and what happens next? Ravn’s canvasses evoke such moments, possibly rooted in a concrete experience or sensation, in which an otherwise hidden truth is momentarily uncovered.
In some pictures Ravn cultivates a fragmentation of his motif, for instance in Fool no. 1-2 (2011) and the seductively fateful Part of me has already left (2010). Scenarios like these carry an imprint of something transforming, of something threatened by an inner disruption, or suggestively expose what is meaningless and absurd in modern human conditions. From a different angle, the disruption of a, seen from the outside, perfected and successful existence, is examined in a continued series of men falling. Trimmed men’s bodies in suits and dress-shoes shined to a gloss, tumble in a perfect loss of control and dignity. At the same time, it is a painted choreography unfolding on the canvasses. Ravn’s sensitivity for body language makes the tilting unenviability of the fall hit us right between the eyes. The deeply anchored adopted rules of how we move among each other in the corridors of modern society are put on display.
Ravn’s motifs often evolve in series, wherein one idea is varied and nuanced over the course of years. Once in a while he lets the men lose their grounding entirely and float in a metaphysical void, detached from the physical order of normality, for instance in Only Elevation (2010) and Upwards (2013). Here, Ravn ventures into his character’s mental space, where he, yielding great empathy and precision, attach concrete imagery to the feeling of dissolving under the strain of inner or outer pressure: The outside world’s expectations of efficiency and discipline, expectations of the individual towards itself, but also a humanity manifesting itself as an irresistible inner pressure despite the protection of self-discipline. Sometimes the men seem divided into several interacting personas – screaming in each other’s faces, crawling confused in opposite directions, tenderly holding each other – while scattered signs of affect break through their otherwise ash-grey bodies and faces.
Peter Ravn graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Architecture in 1980. Before his artistic debut he worked in the record industry doing design and visual identity for many years, and through the eighties and nineties, he was the graphic director behind many of the biggest Danish bands and artists. During that same period, he wrote and directed a slew of music videos and established the fashion brand Democrats. Throughout the nineties – in his eyes – the record industry lost some of its innocence and playful creative urge, and so he turned to painting, which he calls the last bastion of creativity.
Ravn paints alla prima, or what we call wet on wet. This technique makes it possible for him to work freely and play with the surfaces of the painting, especially where they are adjacent to each other. Instead of sharply dividing these collisions, he establishes living border zones between figures and surroundings, further underlining the liquid mental state his characters are in. With a wide brush dipped in the two color-shades of the transition, Ravn strives to nail the exact stroke that will leave the transition vibrating. His painting bears testimony of intuitive, physical decisions, beyond mental reasoning. A willful loss of control based on years of acquired technical certainty.
Ravn’s art is permeated by an intense fascination of b/w photography and central European visual culture from the 20th century, and filmmakers such as Hitchcock, Bergman, Tati, Fellini and Kubrick have always been guiding stars, aesthetically speaking. To begin with, he used a very limited colour range of black, white and ochre oil paints. Later he added ultramarine and vermillion. Usually, Ravn only operates within a spectrum of these five colors, but in newer garden and forest paintings, lemon yellow has a hand in the saturated juiciness of the green.
Albeit his artistic evolution, to a fleeing eye, may seem unconventional, intimate threads run from his first record covers and designs to the themes he uses in his art. The cover for Tøsedrengene 3 (1982) visualizes the disciplined body from a young age, while Gangway’s Out on the Rebound for Love (1985) introduces the suited modern men. Both carry b/w photography’s lightly nostalgic touch reminiscent of a lost world. The painting’s general examination of the modern man’s disciplined exterior and tumultuous interior is already apparent in Ravn’s fashion design, playing with a male role in conflict with its identity and instincts (Trust Your Intuition, 1991).
In later years, the men have begun to break out of their mental vacuum and occupy a kind of landscape. Some are in the semi-natural space of the garden. Others seem, like Gulliver, to have been dropped into open, cultivated landscapes with farms and branched road networks slicing and dividing nature into separated fields. Others still have ventured into the woods and are embraced by nature. Whereas the void abstract surfaces, which the men used to inhabit, are perceived as mental spaces, we now take a step back and see them as fellow humans in a space we can relate to physically. The garden paintings contain a great deal of the dark humour that runs like an undercurrent just shy of the surface in Ravn’s paintings. The men try, to the best of their abilities, while still wearing tight suit jackets and ties, to relax in the recreational space the garden is meant to constitute. The animalistic side of humans remains as contained and tamed as the garden space is in relation to the wild nature.
Those men, who in the most recent paintings have sought out the forest, may be heading away from the civilizational condition their suits represent. The forest is full of entangled branches, undefinable spots on paths and ominous, hard shadows. In its own right, it is a mental space as well, the difference being that here the men are heading somewhere. The question is where to? They have landed in a location where they seem misplaced, where they don’t belong. It evokes associations to a filmmaker like David Lynch who places his antagonists in surroundings they basically do not comprehend. A basic theme in modernity that also preoccupies Ravn intensely.
To many, nature represents a safe place, an original habitat we can return to and escape the constant demands and deadlines of modernity. But Ravn also depicts the forest as a zone of indeterminacy. The men pick up canes, possibly for defense against potential dangers. They seem to be returning to a pre-civilizational state, ready to strike a blow to maintain their own existence. The hard shadow in The Wanderer (2020) evokes a likeness to the contours of the primitive man.
In parallel to the recent garden and forest motifs sought out by the men, Ravn has painted a series of dystopian landscapes. Here the surveying eye has elevated itself to drone altitude. A common denominator for the different paintings in which landscape plays a defining role, is the thematization of an apocalyptic nature around and within the human itself. Here it is of interest to dwell on the tangible sculptural landscapes Ravn creates from found textiles and objects from anno dazumal. The series Human Landscapes (2018) are landscapes produced from old grass-green woolen coats, tightly draped around bodily molds. The bodies, constituting the landscape or nature, are buttoned taught, repressed like forbidden emotions. The antiquated choice of textile, reminding one of Central Europe in between the world wars, connotes a world of yesteryear where emotions and urges are strictly subdued, but where violence lurks just beneath the surface. The same goes for the odd sculptural object Double Domestication (2018) where the woolen fabric is included in a sensual correspondence with an old whipping cane crowned by the head of a beloved, deceased dog and constrained by leather straps. The leap from the sharply dressed male bodies and their inhibited-violent physical relations in Ravn’s paintings to these fabric-clad objects is actually not that far. Same goes for the leap between Ravn’s depictions of suit-wearing men to his portraits of streamlined purebred dogs. Humans are also domesticated animals of sorts.
However, demand for keeping emotions in check and covering up traumas is no less urgent today. Ravn’s visual universe testifies to that. The structural, masculine violence faces both inwards and outwards and is illustrated in a way that can make anyone lose their breath – motif or spectator, dominator or underdog.
Seen through the eyes of Ravn, despair seems to go hand in hand with modernity. The aestheticized spaces made up by his pieces, and his sense for the division of modern man, in symphony creates a beautiful nightmare and is so recognizable that the viewer gets drawn in by the apparent everyday setting. You recognize something without necessarily admitting your kinship to it.
You can feel burdened by facing the emotions that are played out in Ravn’s universe – the painful awkwardness, aggression, loss of control, anxiety and discouragement, with inserts of sardonic humor. But the pictures are also cathartic in the sense that they create an immediate identification. The men in their modern uniforms are so generic that we can see ourselves in them. Our own attempts at balancing the knife’s edge of early 21st century existence. Our own fallibility and embarrassment when the outer shell cracks. Even if Ravn’s imagery is male populated, these men are a projection of western people regardless of gender, of the multitude of demands of perfection and optimization that drives us, and of the abysses we fall into when that futile venture fails.
I regard Ravn as related to several of the artists I have described as an existential countercurrent of contemporary art, in my book Sorte Billeder (“Black Images”, 2007). A group of painters working in opposition to the kind of contemporary art that is based on, and dependent on, theory to make sense. It is obvious to compare Ravn to Peter Martensen (b. 1953) as they both operate within a circle of motifs featuring anonymous, multiplied men in modern uniforms. Also In regards to virtuosity of craft is he comparable to Balder Olrik (b. 1966) or Michael Kvium (b. 1955). He thus carries on a tradition of the sensuous and narrative painting that was maintained throughout the 20th century by painters like Edward Hopper, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Gerhard Richter, in spite of theoretical resistance.
Text from the book “Peter Ravn” published by Forlaget Aftryk, 2021.