Allan Otte

ALLAN OTTE

AGRICULTURE IN AN AGE OF HIGH-TECH

Allan Otte works in the long tradition of landscape painting and depictions of countryside life, central to Danish painting in the early 19th century. In Otte’s computer generated images, however, the farm idyll of yore has been replaced by raw realism and grey rainy bleakness.

Article Fragment and Gesture Bubbles, 2004

Description
By a deserted country road lies a farm in a nondescript overcast light. The edifice and the surrounding farmland are abandoned; only an open window on the building’s gable suggests a human presence. The two-winged farm is recognisable due to the accurately drawn details but the unfocused and indefinable details seem artificial. The farm is placed in a delimited area in the bottom half of the painting on a uniform, white background. Floating above it are six circular ‘bubbles’ filled out with horizontal brushstrokes in shimmering colours.

Made with a complicated technique, the painting combines a realistic rendering of a subject with abstract, spray painted elements. The colour scheme of the painting is dominated by cool greys, disrupted by the white of the background and the pink, green and blue pastels in the top half of the picture.

About the work
In Article Fragment and Gesture Bubbles Allan Otte has created an evocative universe that is both familiar and strange. The painting’s recognisable elements are countered by a surreal atmosphere supported by the synthetic pastels. Otte enhances this sense of looking at a fictitious universe, partly by employing an airbrush technique or applying the paint in vertical and horizontal movements, counteracting the spatiality of the subject, engendering a kind of abstraction. And partly by constructing the painting from discrete elements which appear to be placed on the surface of the picture with no logical, interconnected relations.
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About Otte’s art in general
Otte’s derelict pictures portray with objective distance a contemporary, abandoned agriculture subject to industrialisation’s demands for efficiency. The subjects of the paintings are real and immediately recognisable. But at the same time surreal elements have a tendency to crop up in the pictures when suddenly the farm hovers in a thought balloon or is deported to an isolated rocky island. Or when Otte “masks” a contemporary agricultural building from its surroundings, making it appear to be isolated on an island in the centre of the painting’s grey surface.
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Literature
ARKEN Bulletin, Volume 3, 2006.
”Allan Otte: Everything is Good Here”, Galleri Tom Christoffersen, Himmerlands Kunstmuseum, 2006.
”Det var så dejligt derude på landet: interview med Danmarks nye landskabsmaler, Allan Otte” (Krestina Skirl and Mette Mortensen) in Kulturo, volume 12, no. 23, 2006.