source: sisgalleryorg

Martin Erik Andersen’s sculptures can be described as re-organizations of objects and materials that are characterized by the fact that despite their immediately apparent mutual diversity, they are all related to the familiar sphere of experience. Among the various kinds of spaces that can be enumerated offhand in his works are the home, the room and the workshop as well as more specifically cultural spaces like the laboratory and the sanctuary. Above and beyond the register of these more or less familiar connections, there is also an ongoing schematization of individual objects that takes place. In this connection, mention can be made of the bed, the table, the lamp, the shelf, the wall, the door, the drying rack and the parasol. That what we have before us are registrations or schematizations rather than direct representations of reality is borne out by the fact that the references are always being made merely in a generally casual manner and by way of suggestion: a chipboard placed on top of a steel support serves to delineate a bed, a fluorescent light tube covered with colored knitted swatches of acrylic material can serve as the sketch for a lamp. The open schematization of familiar spaces and objects seems to confine the real within our reach as a kind of underlying grammar that the works can play up against.

The presence of the real can also be traced in the artwork’s striking and distinctive materiality. A registration of recurrent articles and materials includes steel supports comprised of iron fittings, iron profiles, mounting brackets, chipboards, laths, floor carpets, Persian carpets, rugs of hide, glass plates, mirrors, video monitors, computers and loudspeakers, cameras (including cables and cable-end boxes), knitted swatches of acrylic material, tissue paper, foil, printed matter (newspapers and comic strips), protective packing cardboard, underfelt, music, fluorescent/neon tubes, colored electric light bulbs, silk-, acrylic- and latex-cushions, incense sticks, hotplates, record players, decorative articles (crocheted swatches of acrylic fiber, pompons, tassels, cotillions), graphic prints (silk screens, painted silk screens, offset prints, lithographs), plaster, wax, stearin, polyester, papier mâché, bronze, paper, concrete, plastic, marble and cardboard. All materials awaken different sensibilities and come to be linked into different complexes of meaning. What arises in the couplings between them, however, is a form of order spanning across them, which does not resemble the rational order but appears nonetheless to be manifesting itself as a kind of progressive systematic. Here, a record player and a hotplate are not only contrary terms; they are also reflections of each other.