Mountains Much Mightier

Danish landscape painting has a history of more than 250 years, in which every generation of painters has seen and interpreted nature with their eyes, their optics. Therefore, our landscape painting has been endlessly developing since the middle of the 17th. Century. Our time also holds its landscape painters, who thematically use nature to tell a story about our age. Many of the younger artists describe nature mostly through video and photography, as this opens new possibilities to experiment with the visual effects. Among the very few Danish artists of the quite young generation, who paint landscape pictures and who instinctively feel drawn by nature, preferably in its grandest, purest form, is Bjørn Pierri Enevoldsen. With a sense of the drama of the landscape, he paints its complexity and richness in detail with a romantic disposition.

The raw and untouched mountain landscapes are the ones which fascinate Bjørn Pierri Enevoldsen. The wild, virginal nature at impracticable heights has inspired him to a series of vertical landscapes where the heights alone may impose a sinking feeling. Only recently did Bjørn Pierri Enevoldsen make an acquaintance with Greenland which was of decisive significance to his latest paintings. The meeting with the grand, arctic landscape with steep hills against an ice blue sky became an artistic challenge to Bjørn Pierri Enevoldsen, which resulted in a series of pictures that shows a rare dramatic view of nature, which fully recalls Kant’s words about the sublime feeling that can only occur when confronted with the formless, unmeasurable, that which cannot be synthesized in the senses. To Bjørn Pierri Enevoldsen the sublime does not only emerge in the experience of the formless, the unlimited, but also on the background of the exaggerated serenity that these mountain landscapes reveal. The bright sunlight makes the glistening, white peaks in the paintings seem equally far away, which offers a feeling of standing in front of space eternal - Cosmos, if you will.

With his grandiose mountain pictures Bjørn Pierri Enevoldsen has deliberately sought an untouched nature, which has in no way been in contact with civilization. Not even with the great expeditions which are known from, among other places, Thorkild Hansen’s marvellous book about Jens Munk and his merits in the Arctic, where by way of introduction it says: “Outside the usual evening scenario started. The ice curlings were parted into golden and dark violet flakes. The snow faded into blue. Winter lingered on. You would have thought that by now it was a full season behind ...” With Jens Munk as well as with Bjørn Pierri Enevoldsen the arctic landscape appears raw and unapproachable, like a primitive nature, drawing the sharp outlines up against the blue sky with its cool colouring.

Violet, rose pink and turquoise colours from the sun substantiate the spectacular in Bjørn Pierri Enevoldsen’s landscapes. Intensely and instinctively mankind’s insignificance and powerlessness is felt against the gigantic icebergs and calving glaciers. The infinitely great in the paintings gives the impression of a painter with equal amounts of courage and humbleness. Certainly it is splendid in this the 21st Century daring to take up the tradition from the masters of the romantic landscape paintings and seek even mightier mountains than so many other painters of our age.

Bente Scavenius

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