MARTIN TAARUP

MARTIN TAARUP WHITTLES LIFE TO HIS OWN DIMENSIONS

With his tadpole eyes full of wistful surprise, his slightly simian mouth and his head the shape of a pineapple under a fashionable silver thatch of hair, he represent the bizarre and cosy, the kinky and the confortable. Here is a aesthetic personality going itself monstrously at the banquet of this world.

With scandinavian morbility he drinks to the full a cup made of satire, irony and elegance. He is much too refined to be a gentleman. In his painting reality submits to a sea change, emerging in heightened poetic terms. Stylization and imagination are indispensable ingrediants of art and must be sought in every possibel vein. Martin shows the secret of how to delight by his basic assertion of the unexpacted. He recognizes the simple effect of placing a candle to cast fantastic shadows. He acheves spectacular effects by inorthodox means. He knows there is no beauty which hat not a trangeness in its proportions and knows by what magic to produce the slumped rump of a hottentot above beribboned shoes. He seems to have no knowledge of the past. His speech is brooken, he has a shambling walk and he sometimes lolls his head on his shoulders in a invertabrate fashion and one wonders if he is trying to hide an intelligent sensetive core or if he is a charlatan pretending to be an intellectual.

He is not only a painter he plies his pen at poetry and playwriting. But phoenix-like he arises from his own ashes like an unearthly marionette stressing his liabillities and making them attractive, all very offhand and contemporary with a simplicity of personality and character that is arresting.

Clifford Wright

1984 Decenter Marienborg

GALLERI

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