The art and the life - About the pictorial world of Henrik Saar
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By Tom Jørgensen, editor of The art newspaper, ”Kunstavisen”, bachelor in history of art
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There may be many reasons to paint figurative, but is there, like in case of Henrik Saar, a close connection between life and work, it will be an existential necessity. The stories, Henrik Saar wants to pass on to us, can´ t simply be communicated in a different way than in a recognizable pictorial language, and not any recognizable visual image. The inspiration comes from the old masters. From the renaissance and the baroque. From the time where artists constructed their pictures with a starting-point in carefully planed drawings for then on the canvas to bring by layer on layer of pure colors until the surface stud sparkling and shining as mother-of-pearl. Seen from an art historical point of view Henrik Saar is combining the predilection of the Florentines for the line and the contours with the Venice worship of the color. The result is a unique, personal and above all uncompromising manner of painting. It would however be wrong to name the stile of Henrik Saar realistic. His paintings do not with it´s stylistic contours, non-naturalistic abbreviation and the deliberated skewed perspective live up to the classical central perspective painting. The inspiration from pre-Columbian art, from the Mexican wall painting, from the symbolism and the surrealism and the generally dreaming and mysterious atmosphere does, that the paintings and drawings of Henrik Saar can´t be seen as imitating reality. The reality that is adapted in the paintings is in another way the inner reality. That process of thoughts and feelings, that the artist experiences in the artistic moment of creation, experienced through a life influenced by disease and enormous personal changes. Changes so big and so painful that the painting real literally has been a plank of salvation to Henrik Saar. Here he has been able to work out the chaotic feelings that have ruled his inner. Here he has been able to transmit them over to the canvas in a process that can only be described as a healing salvation. In the inevitable question, how a painting of such a remarkable private psychological character, may have common interest one can answer, that Henrik Saar as well as the surrealists believe, that there beyond the real personal feelings are common human experiences crossing time and location. A way of perceiving the world that is pre-linguistic, magical and mysterious. A world of belief and hope, of pain, suffer and fear, of salvation and liberation. Everything is tied together by a destiny, which one in the most cases only is half deliberated about. It is not randomly that above the paintings of Henrik Saar rest much of the atmosphere, one finds in Latin American literature. An atmosphere of magic and belief in fate and with sensuality, we rarely find in our cooler Scandinavian latitudes. Often added a humor that only can be described as coal black with a spray of desperation, which does, that it really comes to a head. The pictorial world of Henrik Saar with its uncompromising seriously and existential weight is probably difficult to swallow for a part of the Danish audience that rarely meet art, that has got anything else to offer than formal experiments
or superficial decorative qualities. That art also can be about life and death, destiny, faith and doubt, makes many of us a feel uncertain and reserved. Do one however let go a little on ones usual spectator distance, one will experience as well artistic and human challenge in the paintings of Henrik Saar. A challenge, which in an idealistic way would be able to make a difference in ones life.
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