Peter Bonde

PETER BONDE

WIELDING BRUSH AND PHOTOSHOP

With raw energy, irony and provocation Peter Bonde explores painting’s potential. His pictures occupy a domain between a romantic and a conceptual art form in which the deep, psychological experience of the art is hinted at, yet not delivered.

Born again Painter, 2001

Description
Broad brushstrokes and spray-painted graffiti lines, in acidic and delicate colours, dash across a very large canvas. The ground of the canvas is not white but crammed with digitally printed photographs. There is a raw, chaotic, unfinished character to the painting. The masked photographs are private snapshots which Peter Bonde has combined in a form of digital collage or accumulation. Bonde himself is found centre stage, his back turned, painting in his studio in Mallorca, barefoot and sporting a vest. The other people visible in the painting are all artists and Bonde's personal friends. The work's title, Born Again Painter is written in the top left part of the picture.

About the work
Born Again Painter was created with a computer and a brush in a multi-stage process. The work is fashioned with a variety of layers and styles derived both from the private sphere, subcultural phenomena such as graffiti and sampling and the world of art. The actual brushwork does not begin until quite far into the creative process. Rather than beginning with placing the first brushstrokes on a virginal white canvas, Bonde has created a photographic base on the computer for the painted, abstract areas of colour. The violent, spontaneous brushstrokes and sequences of lines stretching across the canvas' photographic base form a mix of manually and digitally applied colours. Thus Bonde undermines the boundaries between the unique and the reproducible, creating a synthesis between the subjective and the objective idiom in the painting.
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Bondes' art in general
Peter Bonde's art leads a dialogue between spontaneity and consciousness, between emotion and intellect. Since 1982, which saw his breakthrough as one of the Young Wild Ones, he has developed a style of painting which may be regarded as both expressive and conceptual. His paintings are often monumental in size and painted with large, vibrant brushstrokes on top of prints of private photographs. However, the works do not express the artist's profound feelings as in the tradition of Expressionism. Rather they simulate the idea that a painting can express and relate something. An emotional presence and at the same time a strategic distance are present in his art.
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Literature
"Kniven på hovedet", Tranegården, Gentofte, 1982
"Limelight", Charlottenborg, København, 1986
"Billedstorm" (Frederik Stjernfelt & Poul Erik Tøjner), Forlaget Amadeus, 1989
"The Snowball for the Venice Biennial – a collaborative project by Peter Bonde & Jason Rhoades", 48. Venice Biennial, Venice, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1999
"Vitamin P. New Perspectives in Painting" (ed. Barry Schwabsky), London, Phaidon, 2002