Christian Skeel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christian Skeel (born June 8, 1956) is a Danish artist and composer. He lives and works in Copenhagen.

Christian Skeel's paintings are hyperrealistic and sensual representations of the worlds visual presence on a scale from open winter landscapes, waves and tree trunks to other painted pictures and film stills. The paintings have in common that they all lead the familiar and intimate (mostly photographed) space out to the border where it partly breaks down in visual paradoxes.

The open landscape, to give an example, is folded into boxes or cubes or is dissolved to a series of frames that move into the picture, thereby bringing disorder into what is near and far and what is up or down. To step into such landscapes is also to step out into a more disorienting space, where things are partly misplaced and where more than one perspective or sensibility are at work at the same time.

The paintings’ destabilizing of spatial or temporal continuity also leads to collapses between sensual differences, such as between chaos and straight lines or between density and reflection. At the same time the actual motives seems to maintain a certain kind of calm, that invites to absorption and an open mind to the felt connections, visualized in the paintings, between the microscopic and all the way out to cosmos.