Dennis Møgelgaard

Dennis Møgelgaard
Born	Copenhagen, Denmark
Nationality	Danish
Field	Painter

Dennis Møgelgaard is a Danish artist and painter.

The art of Dennis Møgelgaard is expressly representational. Laid out on the oblique planar field are groups of three dimensional objects seen, arranged and manipulated by the artist. That they are immediately recognizable as objects of simple domestic virtue or organic disposition is only partially helpful in viewing the full depth of the artwork. For it is what we bring to the viewing moment, set against the artist’s arrangement, which sharpens our viewing eye in the presence of clarity. Seemingly, creators of pictorial art in the past hundred years have emerged from two distinct sources, or perhaps more appropriately, impulses.

Within the modernist mentality there is the impulse to create visual representations of a totally personal nature which may or may not bear any resemblance to objects or settings we can identify in the world around us. On the other hand a rather stubborn adherence to traditional representational painting, essentially the art of suggesting three dimensions on a two dimensional plane, has persisted int the West. To this tradition, especially as seen in the technically astute but narratively ambiguous works of the Dutch Magic Realists and their immediate successors, Møgelgaard has professed a profound admiration. In his own day in Denmark representation is still something of a passé style, suspect of slavish historicism, devoid of impulsive breakthroughs.

However, the American art historian Craig Owens has warned us of the post-modernist tendency to draw simplistic timelines for the history of creativity. “What has been celebrated as a return to representation after the long night of modernist abstraction is in many instance a critique of representation ….” ^[1]

What that critique requires is the presence of clarity, that moment when we pause to consider the artist's skillful intent, even as we gaze upon the representation at hand. Within the framework of a simplistic abstract/realist dialogue about the nature and meaning of art we tend to focus entirely upon narrative content. By narrative content I mean that which we can see on the picture plane and the response it evokes. The critical consideration reduces all art to a symbolic level. Realism is subject to explications seeking to define the verisimilitude of detail between what the artist sees and what he has depicted. In the case of abstraction, where there is often no verifiable narrative to contrast with personal experience, the viewer is dependent upon a linguistic system of accepted interpretative meanings. What is missing from this highly linguistic approach to art is one aspect of Owen's suggestion that representation can also be a critique as well as an affirmation of what is known. And that missing element is craft, the technique of transferring a desired representational image to the picture plane by means of hand/eye co-ordination. “Works of art are not mirrors, “E.H Gombrich has written, “but they share with mirrors that elusive magic of transformation which is so hard to put into words” ^[2]

An artist is not a photographer, he has not transferred an actual setting to light sensitive paper by means of the mechanical juxtaposition of lenses. He has transformed what he sees at hand to what he creates on the planar field through his ability to will his hand to represent what his eye sees. Creativity is an act of will, usually self-justified. In the Western imagination this will can be a manifestation of the self-indulgent amoralist Frederich Nietzsche conjured up in the Western imagination. But will can also pursue the heroic effect envisioned by John Ruskin, the artist as an outsider from everyday demands, creating something of lasting aesthetic beauty. By willing himself to be a very exact representational painter of still-life art Møgelgaard has accepted a challenge loaded with inspirational possibilities and subject to criticism of manipulating the viewer to a shallow or absurdly sentimental response. Of the three great subjects of realist art, the landscape, still life, and the figure, the still life is the most subject to manipulation. Meyer Shapiro has written that still life “consists of objects that…. Whether artificial or natural, are subordinate to man as objects of use, manipulation and enjoyment; these objects are smaller than ourselves, within arm's reach, and owe their presence and place to a human action or purpose. “They convey man's sense of his power over things in making or utilizing them.” ^[3]

As the artist gathers and groups the random aspects of his still life, he moves into a more personal realm than the landscape painter or portraitist. What the still life artist seeks to do, perhaps unknowlingly, is to engage the viewer in a speculative relationship with a grouping of inanimate objects. Unlike a landscape vista or a charming sitter, the still life is itself lacks a resonance in the human sense of place and being. By laying out, quite clearly, his gathering the still life artist takes the viewer outside of time and space and asks him to stop and look. In Dennis Møgelgaard's art a simple white vessel, a water pitcher or a teapot, often appears. Set with great subtle force, parallel to the picture plane, while at other times at an oblique angle, which opens a formative negative space between the mass and volume of the objects arranged and the suggested depth of the precipitous ledge. By selection a white vessel, whether intentionally or by chance, Møgelgaard has set in motion for the viewer the opportunity to experience the presence of clarity.
Laid before us, in pristine form, easily recognizable, is the vessel. We know that as a symbol in the northern European tradition the vessel was often the instrument of the annunciation, that which holds that which will be. We also know that in the ongoing humanistic tradition the vessel holds that which may refresh, replenish, or cleanse. Such other meanings as the vessel may have sitting there quietly, can emerge only for the viewer in the moment of clarity, of focus upon that which has been laid before us. This is the magical transformation of which Gombrich writes.

True appreciation of art now requires that we step outside the rushing bounds of modernism, putting aside clocks and schedules and appointments logged on the internet. Appreciation calls us to pause and see what the vessel may contain or may pour forth. That it may do neither is an affirmation rather than a flaw in Møgelgaard's realist aesthetic. For in continuing the dialogue between that which we can see and that which we can know we perpetuate the challenge of creativity and elevate aesthetics to a spiritual consideration of purpose devoid of stylistic confrontations.

• 

  Stillife.19x23 cm.2004. Oil on panel

• 

  stillife.1999. 40x45 cm .oil on panel

References

1. ^ Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition, Los Angeles:
   University of California Press, 1992, p. 88.
2. ^ E.H Gombrich, Art And Illusion, Princeton, N.J.:
   Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 6.
3. ^ Meyer Schapiro, “The Apples of Cezanne” in Modern Art:
   Selected Papers, New York: Braziller, 1978, p. 19

External links

• www.dennis-moegelgaard.com

Persondata
Name	Mogelgaard, Dennis
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth
Place of birth	Copenhagen, Denmark
Date of death
Place of death