Axel Antas

Heavy like weights, balloons hang from a tree, nearly pulling its branches down. In another image the balloons reach up, as if attempting to pull the dead tree of the ground. Works like these, Tree Structure (Unbearable lightness) from the series Interventions (2005-2006), by Axel Antas present us nature that is slightly manipulated. The scenes are subtly pushed into a frame of signification with touches that are often less noticeable than the balloons. Photographs and drawings by Antas draw thus attention to the processes in which nature becomes visible and meaningful to us.

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Axel Antas's recent works deepen his related investigations into the relationship between man and nature, and in new ways of conjuring time and space through image-making. These concerns might be best described as being a meditation on how the romantic traditions in modern picture-making might be remade for and continued in the twenty first century. Baudelaire argued that "romanticism and modern art are one and the same thing, in other words: intimacy [and] yearning for the infinite... romanticism is a child of the North... dreams and fairytales are children of the mist...The North, is suffering and anxiety, takes comfort in imagination." Antas seems to interrogate these propositions, by creating startlingly new images which nevertheless are inheritors of the romantic tradition. The artist offers us a series of apparent contradictions, conjuring infinite space and intangible atmosphere through novel and unexpected means. Intimacy and the infinite might seem incompatible qualities, but Antas's recent works marry the two with grace.

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I'm Too Dead to Tell You:
Withdrawing Rooms and other Breathing Spaces in the Work of Axel Antas

Death suspends the relation to place, even though the deceased rests heavily in his spot as if upon the only basis that is left to him. To be precise, this basis lacks, the place is missing, the corpse is not in its place. Where is it? It is not here, and yet it is not anywhere else. Nowhere? But then nowhere is here. (Maurice Blanchot)

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Nature of Things

Antas is exploring the realities of man's own relationships in nature. Figures are identifiable in the drawings, somehow occluded and viewed from behind. Large-scale drawings lightly transfigure dead trees floating in a flat tonal world. Humanity is fleetingly present through the use here of devices including hanging clothing and boxes such as bird boxes, bringing together man's activity and the natural world.

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