[…] Jesper Liengaard is captivated by human beings and objects in the open room. He is a keen observer of ’reality’ and he uses the painting as a mirror of what he sees. The human being is the main character, the objects trendsetting props, which the human beings interacts with and the room they find themself in is big, merciless and open – just like what we experience in the nature by the ocean where the sky is very visible. The style is cartoonlike: the figures appear with a caricatured and grotesque realism. The objects are often iconic and registered in a more sober, almost nerdy, shape. The backgrounds are slightly freaky, abstract surfaces often with an unmistakable sky-like character.
[…] These human beings are being alienated by the outer nature while they also are abandoned by their own unconscious inner nature. They exemplify what we call ’a split of body and mind’, where the human being has lost all contact to its’ nature represented by the body and therefor tries to overcome its’ alienation through use of the head – understood as the will. Willpower can bring you far in life but it does not prevent the baneful impotence that is a result of the overlooked body’s unruly existence in the shadow of the conscious. Liengaard explores the adult human being’s underdeveloped, childlike and incompetent sides. In a humorous and loving way Jesper Liengaard’s figures confronts us with the sides we as human beings are not so happy to face: our helplessness, the self-contempt and the impotence – everything we normally try to ignore – the ’shadow’ that we don’t like to admit we have.
The paintings create compassion and opens up for laughter and (self) forgiveness – they also show how we are being affected of the things and the environments we are located in and how we prepare ourselves to receive way to hard criticism when we over and over again, against our own free will, find ourselves in hopeless and comic situations. Jesper Liengaard consistently reveals himself as the director – the one who pulls the strings and make things happen on the canvas: E.g. with the help of the contrasts between the abstract and the figurative. We understand that the artist has the power and that he is not almighty – because by drops and running colours Jesper Liengaard manages to underline the paintings illusion and its’ playful quality which makes us curious and open to self-recognition and self-awareness in something that in many places is associated with embarrassment and taboo.
Trine Rytter Andersen
