Hardy Ernst (DK)
Hardy Ernst’s expressive linoleum cuts depict figurative, colorful scenes that combine layers of overlapping decorative elements. Collography/linoleum cuts are an important technique used by Ernst. Natural motifs and anthropomorphic features interact with the colorful backgrounds. The titles of the works reveal a predominantly mythical-religious orientation involving figures from the three major religious doctrines: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The artist’s interest in a controversial but versatile theme is thus expressed, with Jerusalem as the centre of gravity for the pilgrimage, the spread, the birthplace, the meeting place, the coexistence.
There is a remarkable ambivalence between, for example, ‘Silence’ and ‘Hypatia’, where the former is bound and pensive, while the latter is free and proud. With the female figure, he explores a familiar dichotomy: the power of silence and the power of movement. Both figures take us back to a deep reflection on the role women have played
in religions and eras. As has been handed down to us in stories and art history, a woman is sometimes a succubus slave and sometimes a fearsome heroine, the bearer of truth.
From Japanese tradition, he takes the figure he explores through the linoleum printing technique in no less than four works: a woman at the bottom of the sea. The figure of the woman or the close-up of her face is highlighted or camouflaged by other marine figures. The theme is the same, but the different patterns created by repeated motifs overlapping the dominant figure demonstrate the versatility of the technique and create new spaces and different interactions between forms. The tangible atmosphere is one of silence and expectation.
In other works, we find a gaze that is more interested in the Middle East, with a warm palette and orientalizing motifs such as palm trees, Bedouins, camels, and wild animals. The artist analyzes the theme of dispersion through infinite spaces, but rationalized by certain figures and geometric shapes that remind us that the environment is nevertheless delimited. Time has no meaning. We live in a dreamlike atmosphere, as in One Thousand and One Nights. Figures and shapes flow through us in a continuous stream and keep us in a suspended atmosphere. A recurring naturalistic element is the palm tree, a characteristic attribute of desert and/or Middle Eastern locations. The palm trees seem to be as fiery as the atmosphere that surrounds them, colored with a deep red/orange hue. The sky and the earth divide each scene into two different fields of action, but are at the same time connected through the cleverly placed objects and figures. In each scene, there is a calm submission to its own chaos; the images and colors are nothing more than a pretext to tell us about a delirium, a vision. The mixture of the known and the unknown creates a feeling of disorientation in the viewer, which is turned upside down by the reception of a clearly recognizable figure, but the juxtaposition of real images and figurative play is realized in itself, in what is defined as the spatial-temporal loss of being. Why do the Bedouin and the camel seem tangible at times and vanished at others? Nothing is what it appears to be; everything is what is created.
Zirma Himlen over Jerusalem
