MFA Student Interview Series, part VII: Jens Alfred Raahauge and Ida Brockmann

In Jens Alfred Raahauge´s MFA exhibition “Bordurien-Flintholm” the space was filled with paintings in vibrant colors. Moving through the space, I was meet by numerous works, all of them drawing me in with imagery which either surprised me or reminded me of memories of my own.    
  

What has the process been like creating this MFA exhibition?     
Looking back, pretty smooth actually, even though I wasn’t sure about the direction going forward. I was just working a lot. I made a lot of works the first year of my MFA, that I thought I’d base my exhibition around, but then I tried to see if I could do something better and ended up not using any of them.   

Last summer I happened to see my childhood home in suburban Copenhagen was up for sale. Now the city’s very expensive to live in, the price had risen astronomically, but I pretended to be a lawyer and had the real estate man show me around. 

The garden was still the same, so I took some photos and decided to do a ‘nostalgia’ theme, but not nostalgia as it’s classically understood - longing for simpler, happier times - but more like a continuous dealing with ambivalent impressions. 

Growing up you get disenchanted as you rationalize things that seemed magic, but at the same time the strong impressions you once had still seem justified, because even though you were naive you also had a more acute sense of the world, and you find that now you’re affected just as much by numbness as by gained insights. So, I was reflecting over impressions that are revived and which I find still affect me, including scary and sad impressions.      

You have chosen motifs to paint which seem to be both echoing archetypal memories, which many viewers will resonate with from their own life, as well as motifs which seem either more personal or a motif such as the crucifixion of Jesus as an image of shared cultural heritage. How have you chosen what you wanted to paint?      
I’m just bumbling around. I did a painting of my childhood garden and then I just did whatever I felt like if it could be related to the theme I mentioned before in some way. I painted stills from a conspiratorial 90’s video, because it was scary in a nostalgic way. I tried out some things where the connection is harder to describe explicitly without watering it down. The crucifixion painting was made on top of an old painting of a view of Hamburg that is still partly visible. I was inspired by Stanley Spencer who painted biblical scenes in contemporary settings, and I’m also from a clerical family so that maybe played a part too. Although the exhibition might have seemed to point in many directions, I was very happy with the overall expression because I think a more streamlined, analytical approach would have been counterproductive considering the theme. People’s reactions at the exhibition were different, some found it colorful and uplifting, some found it disturbing, some found it peaceful. All the elements are there so I was made to agree each time.     

What has been your inspiration?    
A lot of old stuff. In terms of how to paint, Bonnard and Guston are my heroes, and reflecting over my themes I’ve been affected by writers like Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. My favorite living artist is Mamma Andersson but she’s kind of old-fashioned too. Otherwise, my inspirations are kind of intuitive, here and there, along the way. I was also thinking about “zeitgeist”, at least my own perspective of it. How a period in time can have a mood that seems to make perfect sense even though you never fully grasp it, and then times change and looking back it seems weird. And I tried to reflect on today’s mood, where politics and people’s worldview in general is very fractured and conspiratorial. There seems to be a longing towards re-enchantment in different ways, away from cool rationality, but it’s hard to revive a way of seeing the world once it’s been discarded. And while conspiracy theories may have seemed to enchant the world in an ominous way once, now they seem dumb and tiring by being so ever-present, so this is both a general issue in our times as well as an individual feeling

Jens Alfred Raahuage's exhibition was displayed at Malmö Art Gallery (KHM1) June 21st - July 6th 2024. 

Interview by Karin Hald.