Bjarne Melgaard is not only an established artist who has working relationships with galleries such as Gagosian and Ropac, but he is also an individual with a contrasting personality, where light and shadow interpenetrate in an inextricable way.

Bjarne Melgaard “Barney Does It All” 2024, installation view at Faurschou, New York. Photo by Olympia Shannon © courtesy Faurschou

The topics on which he focuses his interest are often the subject of controversy and misunderstanding. In the name of free thought and trespassing outside the confines of bourgeois life, he cultivates outsider behavior and touches on the themes of sexuality (in its most perverse forms), drugs, depression, usually bypassing the boundaries of consolidated morality, often in a provocative way and which most of the time is neither understood nor accepted. Among the various accusations that have been attached to the subjects of his works over time, four emerge redundantly: of being sexist, of presenting traces of racism, of inciting pedophilia and of inciting violence. But the author feels neither guilty nor responsible for how the public perceives (should we say interprets?) his works.

Bjarne Melgaard “Barney Does It All” 2024, installation view at Faurschou, New York. Photo by Olympia Shannon © courtesy Faurschou

The expressive means of this great freedom of his are generally essentially paintings and drawings relating to the sphere of expressionism, photographic and video works, sculptures and installations and environments. The desire is to create a clear contrast, almost a creaking of teeth, where heat and cold are contaminated, where the dark and the sunny can coexist without any hesitation. The world that emerges is complex, sometimes chaotic, a world where it is difficult to find a thread that can lead us along a linear path. There is no shortage of phrases and slogans, and fragments and words that overlap: a plot that becomes a tangle, a universe with porous boundaries that are difficult to follow. Magma is not only a result, but also a process, a boiling matter. We can talk about an art of feeling rather than an art that looks at the reality of things, an introspective journey rather than a description of the surrounding world. The surrounding world, with all its references to high and low culture, is always present, but is filtered by an internal drive that acts as the driving force and genesis of his entire work.

BBjarne Melgaard “Barney Does It All” 2024, installation view at Faurschou, New York. Photo by Olympia Shannon © courtesy Faurschou

At the moment Faurschou dedicates a solo show to Melgaard that includes films, paintings, sculptures and assemblages. The common thread is that of the darkest sides of humanity, but in transparency it is completely clear that the author is presenting us with a kind of first-person narration: he opens the book of his life to us. The central point of the exhibition is the film that Fred Heggland and Morten Haslerud dedicated to him and where an interior monologue merges with archive clips and images of popular culture, as if to indicate the continuous struggle that Melgaard, as an artist and drug addict, has brought forth to subdue demons and bring out his creativity. But the revealing page is a showcase full of objects from the artist’s studio and which offers us a direct look at his creative process and the personal ideas that fuel his work.

Bjarne Melgaard “Barney Does It All” 2024, installation view at Faurschou, New York. Photo by Olympia Shannon © courtesy Faurschou

Here are the artist’s words: «The movie is about trying to believe in yourself as an artist. Trying to convince yourself that you have something to say. And for me, it has always important that what I have to say is very simple. If I paint a painting of a cow, it’s a painting of a cow. There is nothing underneath ». Holy truth that leads to the immediacy of painting, but which makes us think that the cow could also fly in the sky or in a room and then it would no longer be just a cow, but could talk to us about something else. The fact remains that this appointment at Faurschou is for Melgaard another important piece of his exuberant and uncontainable creativity.

Info:

Bjarne Melgaard, Barney Does It All
8/2/2024 – 14/7/2024
Faurschou New York
148 Green St, Brooklyn
www.faurschou.com
newyork@faurschou.com

Roberto Vidali

He is editorial director of Juliet art magazine.