Sune Christiansen (1976) has developed a distinctive approach to figurative abstraction that is as ambiguous and suggestive as it is playful and engaging.
Christiansen draws on his extensive experience in the use of digital drawing tools to refine the palettes and compositions of his works, preferring to begin each painting with a process of sketching and refining with the iPad. Once an arrangement of forms has been identified, Christiansen begins to respond to these preliminary drawings on the surface of the canvas, focusing much more on materiality and visual sensation than on any attempt to faithfully reproduce the sketch.
attempt to faithfully reproduce the original sketch. Embracing the accidental, Christiansen works to create paintings that are both visually appealing but also, ultimately, unpretentious in their basic ambition to achieve a form of expression that contains a certain undeniable truthfulness. Ideas about the figure are often of central importance in Christiansen's works. Working primarily with oils, pastels, acrylics and industrial enamels, the artist skilfully modulates texture, density and speed as he traces the figures and objects in his works.
Although the artist states that he wants to avoid any clear explanation of how he intends his figures to be read, the body language of Christiansen's characters often evokes such broad themes as hierarchical power dynamics, hieroglyphs and other pictorial language structures, religious practices, and the use of words, without leaving the symbolism of intimacy and the sexual.