BRUSSELS.- MARUANI MERCIER is presenting Kasper Sonne: People Are Strange, the second solo exhibition of the artist with the gallery, in Brussels.
Elegant and upright, the figures in this new body of work appear at once in harmony with and in disassociation from the lucid planes of water and sky in the landscape. Looking away in quiet contemplation, the elongated human presence in each work projects an almost mythic quality, as if traversing the space in solitude that feels timeless rather than incidental.
The paradox of iconic contemporary outfits in natural settings, together with the spectral light and the luminous palette in this new body of work projects a powerful sense of the instability of the human condition and questions the possibility of connection with another. As the artist notes, “For me, it's always this conflict – it's about displacement. I create these characters that have no obvious reason to be in these environments.”
In Purple Rain, the composed stance of the protagonist against electric hues of blue and magenta, with her elegant suit and gloves, conjures the sense of a carefully constructed image – a projection of contemporary identity, rather than a portrayal of a specific person. Working in layers, Sonne carves each character from an array of visual sources, from art historical references to fashion advertisements found on social media. Foregrounding quotations from signature pieces of contemporary fashion, the artist uses clothing as a cultural signifier, binding the figures to questions of status, aspiration and belonging.
Sonne’s characters evoke the ‘idealised selves’ continually fashioned on social platforms – images suspended between authenticity and invention. For Sonne, whose own engagement with social media is bound up with the conflicting experiences of connection and isolation, this ambiguity is deeply personal. The platforms offer access to a world beyond one’s immediate surroundings, while at the same time intensifying a sense of distance from it, replacing direct experience with a flow of often carefully fabricated images. His figures emerge from a similar contradiction, simultaneously questioning the possibility of companionship and embodying the distance that separates one person from another.
The image of the ocean threads through each work in People Are Strange, forming a kind of shared horizon line. Having grown up in close proximity to the sea, Sonne is drawn to its immensity and hidden power; he notes, “the ocean is beauty and horror, quiet and rage. It is vast and deep and full of secrets.” Highlighting the border between the sea and land, the paintings appear to allude to the limits of human experience and an enduring search for transformation or renewal. In The Balcony (female), a mysterious figure is parted from the dark water by a metal railing – a subtle reference to Manet’s Le balcon (1868-69). Where Manet’s balcony distances the figures from the viewer, Sonne reverses this relationship, bringing his protagonist into our space and emphasising the inaccessibility of the ocean beyond.
Collectively, the paintings bring forth a meditation on ‘oceanic feeling’, an idea first coined by the French poet Romain Rolland in his letter to Sigmund Freud, and later expanded by Carl Jung. Freud noted his response to Rolland in Civilization and Its Discontents: “it is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic’. […] it is a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.’ The ocean is emblematic of a pure experience beyond the self, of the fluid entanglement of living and non-living things, in part because it cannot be reduced to an object or a finite entity. The infinite complexity of its internal systems resembles the permutations and depth of unconscious thought lying beneath the surface.
In Nude (female) and Nude (male), the ghost-like protagonists stretched on the beach are set against an unnaturally vivid sea and sky. The intensity of heat and sun enveloping the male figure is particularly palpable; set against the dark horizon his pale body appears more exposed, both physically and existentially. The works introduce an undercurrent of ecological anxiety into the exhibition, as the beach becomes a shifting threshold shaped by the growing instability of the climate. Against the expanse of water, the recumbent bodies acquire an ambiguous stillness, suggesting at once repose and vulnerability, amid an environment undergoing irreversible change.
Working on unprimed linen, Sonne applies thinned paint in numerous layers that coalesce into humming, almost shimmering colour fields. Executed after a period of prolonged material experimentation, the works in People Are Strange further extend the tactile quality of the surface by juxtaposing areas of thin pigment seeping into the canvas with energetic gestural passages. In Skull Earring, the sections of thick brushwork delineating the figure intensify her towering presence in the composition. Enveloped in luminous hues of a landscape rendered in a distinctly translucent texture, she appears estranged from the setting, as if emerging from the sea in an act of transcendence. The materiality of impasto in her skirt evokes the surface of a tree and an image from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – the narrative of Daphne who transforms into a laurel tree and thus becomes part of the natural environment. Likewise, the human presence in the painting seems entwined with the landscape setting, which in turn becomes a site of charged psychological experience.
The sense of ethereality in Sonne’s figures is amplified by multiple and mysterious sources of light that imbue the works with an almost cinematic quality. In Vampire, the features of the protagonist mark the focal point of the composition, set against the muted glow of the setting moon. Seemingly turning towards external light, his expression evinces a nuanced psychological interiority. Gradually constructing and reworking the features of the face, the artist seeks empathy and connection with his enigmatic characters, who appear to hover between eccentricity and introspection. Through this delicate tension, Sonne deepens his exploration of isolation and belonging, presenting the human figure as both vividly contemporary and strangely untethered from time.
