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Martin Torsleff
Dalgas Avenue 21
DK-8000, Aarhus C
Denmark
Tel: +45 40 35 55 44
www.martintorsleff.com
artist@martintorsleff.com

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The answer is that these are pictures made for empty walls, but certainly not for empty brains: first and foremost, there is an almost xylographic persistance in many of his pictures. You simply have to allow a distance to these works, and then you will see that the comparison to a flickering mega-sized television-screen is not very far off. Torsleff is, of course, quite aware of this, and he shows a talented, intellectual capacity – and highly literary values – in his use of …intertextuality: Actually he uses subtitles on many of his works. I can’t vouch for the translation of the presumed utterances of Anne Bancroft and Norma Jean Baker – it is drawn in Danish, but let me give an example in the case of Louis Armstrong: First line is ’Oh my god, it’s full of stars’ and second line is ’You’re flying the Concorde, sir’. The first line shows Torsleff’s love of the film-media, but also his literary ambitions and intellectual gaming with the audience; we all know what Captain David Bowman said when he entered the ancient, cosmic railway-station – so the following utterance must be imaginative. At least Torsleff could not give a clear explication of this. But perhaps there really is a very refined Concordance in these high-flying works; as long as some stars are bigger than us, Torsleff will continue his ingenious explorations of the human possibilities in a rather big and relatively strange universe.
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