PAINTING THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE WORLD.

By Tom Jorgensen, reviewer at the “Ekstra Bladet”, a Danish popular daily and editor of the “Kunstavisen”, a monthly national magazine about topical art.

Jackpot! This is the name of Tom Kroejers latest series of paintings, created in the porter’s lodge at Glorup Manor in Funen where the ever travelling Tom Kroejer is domiciled at present. If one believes in fate, there must be a deeper sense in the fact that the 59-year-old artist has settled precisely here, because it was at the very same Glorup Manor that another globe-trotter, H. C. Andersen, often came to stay.

Kroejer has never made a secret of his admiration for old H. C., his imagination, his creative powers and his incomparable capability to express a diversity of nuances in the language.

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Jackpot! The entire series of brilliantly coloured paintings has the same subtle combination of insight, sensuality and refined sense of humour which H. C. too possessed; that is, when he was not complaining about his eternal troubles with his belly, money or love affairs.

Because Jackpot is precisely what cannot be the result of Kroejers paintings. Even though the colourful shapes are similar to each other, there are not two that are identical in the entire series, but 212 different. A gambler’s nightmare!

Kroejer is out for nothing less than an artistic rehashing of the entire modern nuclear physics and thermodynamics. When he names each individual painting “Undividable Paintings” he is referring to the quest for the smallest particles in the universe that has engaged the attention of the Western World since classical Antiquity;  a quest which has only led to ever smaller particles, molecules, atoms, electrons, ions, etc., etc., apparently indefinitely. As if nature mocks at our scientific attempt to grasp cosmos with a pair of scales and a measuring tape.

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I think that the first person to realise this fact, was our own Niels Bohr, who started to sense that the whole cosmos, micro or macro, is a paradoxical and capricious one, where every scientific experiment is affected by the person carrying out the experiment. So logic is out the window when it is no longer 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 but 1, blue, circus, giggle, Q. No wonder that Einstein exclaimed indignantly that surely God does not play dice with the universe.

For Kroejer, however, the dice image is quite adequate, for what is lost in terms of logic and clarity is gained in terms of imagination and diversity. Bohr’s universe is a universe in which any kind of fundamentalism, religious or artistic, is absurd and self-contradictory, and if there is anything that Kroejer does not like, it is fundamentalism.

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Right from his outset in the Eks-school, where he mixed with such celebrity artists as Kirkeby, Gernes and Noergaard he detested dogmas, which resulted in his exclusion by the very left wing-like Kirkeby from the school, a fate shared by many others. For Kroejer the school was not a holy calling, but a practical opportunity to gain access to the expensive printing machines.

And he also had another characteristic that fit poorly into the rather self-important image of the Eks-school: an anarchistic and humorous view of life as well as of art.

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During the politically correct ‘70s, where Kroejer participated in a large number of collective happenings, for instance under the auspices of the Drakabygget, his heartfelt engagement in society was almost always coloured by a Monty Python-like humour that separated him from the all too sanctimonious artists.

Furthermore, an interest in Andy Warhol that in time would make old brothers-in-arms declare Kroejer a commercial and gallery-like artist, is also a part of the picture.

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Kroejer admires Andy because this peroxided eccentric revolutionised the entire notion of the role of art.

Firstly of all, Warhol chose subjects which until then had been generally disliked by the highbrow establishment: the movie and pop stars, the headlines and the commercial world of advertising, in short, the heretic symbols of mass culture and consumerism. In his art, Warhol cheers everything that the consumer of the new era utilised in everyday life and turns the concepts of highbrow and lowbrow culture up-side-down.

Second of all, by his serigraphy he shows how to mass produce art, so that it becomes something everybody can afford. With his impartial and distanced view of things he registered everything from Elvis, Coke bottles, Jackie Kennedy and flowers to car accidents and electrical chairs. The art had come down to earth, it had become democratic and if Warhol had by that reduced the artist to a mere producer of goods, it was something we could live with, for what could be more popular than doing something that ordinary people were fond of and could afford?

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All this was to Tom Kroejer’s liking.

As the ‘70s wore on, he got ever more fed up by being lead by the nose by art dealers who might just as well be selling chocolate or garden gnomes and he decided that the best thing to do was to meet the consumer society on its terms and become an art producer or a free merchant as he terms it himself. Thanks to his deep resentment against becoming yet another artist funded by the government and thereby incapacitated, he had excluded himself from the self-important brotherhood of the Parnassus anyway.

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Inspired by Andy and pop art, Kroejer now begins painting the entire multiplicity of this wonderful world. The pulsating beat of Manhattan, the lavender scented landscapes of Provence, the lush gardens of Japan, the bays of Ireland, laden with rain, and the sleepy small towns of Denmark.

Kroejer selects a subject that is already beautiful, a landscape, some fruits, a market place, an advertisement display pillar, in short, anything, makes a sketch on which the colour scheme is noted and then paints the final painting with all the skill that lifelong grind has taught him. In time Kroejer has achieved an arabesque-like beauty and simplicity in his pictures which remind us of partly Matisse, partly Hockney and the American pop artists, a space accentuated, colourful and pleasurable type of painting.

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With his independence, his curiosity and sense of humour, Tom Kroejer is closer to the visions of the ‘60s of a democratic popular art than all the bilious avant-gardiste artists, who take pride in being as immaterial and stowed-away-in-ivory-towers as possible. It strikes me as odd that an ability to do well without public funding should be a sign of artistic decay, but then again, there are so many things that are odd in the odd world of art.

Finally, let me quote a few word by Matisse which fits well into the artistic universe of Tom Kroejer:

“I dream about art in balance, pure and serious art, devoid of disturbing and depressing subjects, art which is potentially reassuring, something mentally consoling like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue to every intellectual worker, business man or author”.

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