Bourouina is pleased to present the Danish artist Adam Saks’s third solo show at the gallery.

Since his successful solo show in spring 2011, the work of Adam Saks has undergone a continual process of research and further development: his change of medium—from oil colour to acrylics—was already a significant factor in the works presented at his last exhibition Follow You Follow Me. The shift, according to Saks, marked an important act of liberation with regard to his working process. Now, with his new acrylic paintings subsumed under the title Atropa, Saks presents us with an exponentiated, yet more concentrated painterly power. These paintings are denser and more intense; he has arrived at a greater breadth of painterly volume. In place of the explosive gestural tumultuousness often integral to his work from the past, his compositions now provide an implosive maximization of strength and energy.

Atropa refers to a nightshade species of flowering and psychoactive drug-bearing plants designated as Atropa belladonna, or Death Cherries. Saks keeps the symbolism of the opium poppy ambiguous, thus unfurling widely formed fields of meaning. Dream, intoxication, sleep, impermanence and death are the themes around which his accomplished painterly universe revolves. The relationship between humankind and nature, existence and expiration are among the concerns Saks has handled in previous works. In these latest paintings, Saks veritably dredges through the depths. He lays and lifts veils, which lie over, and under, the motifs. In a process of progressive diffusion, figures appear upon the canvas, only to become disbanded in the next moment by means of colour. Often, the delineation between painting and objects is blurred in the process. Motifal concentrates such as opium poppy pods, animal figures and skeletal remains are part of an inner-civilisational wilderness, in which—due to the painterly overlapping of motifs and disparate temporal planes—even parallel worlds would seem to exist.

Saks’s extraordinary palette is rooted in darkness: dark, shadowy swaths entangle black contours; white veils of mist and fog encounter watery, transparent colour fields or sometimes dense and rich colour islands. Saks infuses his paintings with a mysterious and exotic atmosphere, in which real ‘energy fields’ open up. The spectator dives into marvelously wide fields of meaning and experiences that the unknown is still possible to discover.

The exhibition contains twelve acrylic works as well as new drawings—the latter being viewed by Saks as part of an ‘experimentum’ for his large-scale paintings. The small oil pencil drawings correspond, in the intimacy of their formats, with the concentrated density of the acrylic works, though still remaining within their own cosmos.

The Bourouina Gallery is glad to announce “Sacré Nom de Dieu!” – its first solo-exhibition of Adam Saks. You are cordially invited to the opening on Friday, February 13, between 6 and 9 pm. The artist will be present. In beautiful abandon Adam Saks’ most recent paintings and works on paper unleash an adventurous delirium of crude seafaring romanticism, grotesque chimeras, serpentine blazonry and shredded script, exotic oddity museums, compendiums of heraldry and emblemata, of ‘Heia, Safari’, disconcerting scenes of torture and colonial fantasies, comics, tattoo magazines, disreputable show girls or military devotional objects. Compliably he lets the found motifal flotsam collide and clash as if seen through a psychedelic kaleidoscope. Comforting loathing and fearful idylls blur just as appraisingly as appallingly into one another, are painterly collaged, painted off and clinched together all anew. Even the beholder’s gaze is ravished and tossed about upon these rough paintings – now stranding here, now somewhere other. Motifs wander and slip away, are torn and beaten and bawled out. Adam Saks bares himself with heinous abandon in his pictures, and these crotchety, awkward, nailed-down and ornery, over-packed and gracefully bizarre escapades bear themselves with heinous wantonness. Blood, sweat, oil, and watercolours: Sacré Nom de Dieu! A catalogue in form of a tabloid accompanies the exhibition.

Saks belongs to the young generation of artists who have discovered the countless astonishing possibilities presented by painting and graphic art, and who paint pictures that everyone can relate to. As applies to many of his contemporary colleagues both in Denmark and abroad, his art is in a “postmedial” phase, where painting has displaced the new media. However, in no way does Saks turn the clock back to the state of innocence of abstract expressive painting, where the artist simply paints on the basis of feeling and intuition; on the contrary, he integrates his experiences from installation art, video art and computer art on the surface while inviting the surrounding world inside and disrespectfully making use of mass-media images, including children’s book illustrations, tattooing and the narrative universes of the strip cartoon.

He is inspired by the French Foreign Legion with its colonial history, solitude and aggression. In his paperworks Adam Saks draws his inspiration from Russian criminal tattoos, which emerges as traces of a human presence and is combined with fragments of landscapes, interiors and stories from exotic regions.