My work is about threads, connections, stories, narratives – personal/private – attempted opened up and widened out to the general and recognizable. I am a human being who, like all of us, contains melancholy as euphoria. My personal life has been marked by breaks and cracks, as of light and joy, – threads that frayed and split and had to be put back together, over the years, with help, patience, and love.
I believe in the effect of art in my own life as a healer, as a reliever of life’s arbitrary points of pain, as an expectation-free space in my existential journey, as a channel for the fine, delicate expressions, for the fine crystallized tones that find their way through an everyday life and an existence that is sometimes melancholic and grey, other times euphoric and thundering light. I generally believe that art can also fulfill this function between people, as something existentially universal, a language that through its essence reaches widely, reaches body before thought, when the shared before the exclusive.
I believe in contrasts. In visual artistic counterpoints. In the fact that the fine crystallized expressions, the oscillations, potentially arise in encounters, in love and in struggle. Melancholy, sadness, tragedy find their counterpoints precisely in the light, in joy, in euphoria. For me, if possible, liberated through poetry, aesthetics, connections, through ruptures, defeats – reconciliations and redemptions. The beautiful and fine must be present in order to have a redeeming effect. And can only be so by potentially touching the violent, the tragic, the difficult.
In my photographic works, I reconsider my journey. I seek to reopen my sensation, make it present, ask about the nature of photography as well as painting, about the subjective, the sensual, about presence, – about how a photograph, processed using oil paint, digital editing and printing, can come into oscillation? How a potential presence can be liberated, bodily, sensual, intellectual, through poetry and aesthetics, text and image. The personal attempted unfolded, the melancholic oscillating with the euphoric.
Nikolaj Callesen 