Simone Cappa

Min­i­mal­ist artist John Gesager Nielsen’s ove­ture are a trib­ute to the legacy of sculp­ture and engi­neer­ing as well as to its vision­ary union of art and nature. Nielsen’s ques­tion­ing of the con­ven­tional atti­tudes of art and cul­ture does not stop with the cre­ation of objects and images; he is com­mit­ted to explor­ing of atti­tudes and ideas as a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of his work. Nielsen has been cre­at­ing evoca­tive fig­u­ra­tive and abstract sculp­ture for many years. An earnest devo­tee to the human con­di­tion, he ren­ders both Plex­i­glas, and metal in an elon­gated, man­ner­ist style. Nielsen who is Danish-born, and now based in Nor­way uses his sculp­tures to grap­ple with emo­tions fun­da­men­tal to inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships, from pas­sion and desire, to lone­li­ness and love. His abstracted fig­ure sculp­tures depict indi­vid­u­als and cou­ples run­ning, stand­ing, kneel­ing, and embrac­ing each other—each work pos­sess­ing a sense of life and move­ment that seems to belie the sta­tic nature of sculpture.

The artist’s recent work in Plex­i­glas fur­ther high­light his aston­ish­ing capa­bil­ity to cre­ate fig­u­ra­tive sculp­ture that trans­forms human bod­ies into an elon­gated, aes­thet­i­cal form. His sculp­tures depict­ing cou­ples describe feel­ings such as love, pas­sion and ero­tism. They por­tray per­fect unity and har­mony jux­ta­posed with a strug­gle for dom­i­na­tion and inde­pen­dence. Nielsen’s haunt­ing, poetic—even anguished images could be described as per­fect expres­sions of the way in which human fig­ures form rela­tion­ships with one another in space. Cer­tain pieces (Con­fi­dence for instance) could also been seen as sym­bols of human for­ti­tude. Though the form is heavy and rooted to the ground, each part of the sculp­ture echoes two bod­ies ris­ing up, deter­mined to stand up straight regard­less of any adver­sity they may encounter.

Despite the con­sis­tent use of metal or plex­i­glas through­out Nielsen’s work he is more var­ied than could be assumed— it can be play­ful, sen­sual and even devoutly ten­der. Vol­umes of bod­ies are scat­tered through­out his over­ture; linked through a net­work of con­nected points and faceted planes. In another series, Toward sum­mit the artist high­lights his innately diverse nature: ten­ta­tive of sur­face and awk­ward in descrip­tion, this series sharp­ens one’s sense of Nielsen’s devel­op­ing pow­ers, not only in his capac­ity for emo­tional depth and sur­face vari­ety, but also in terms of com­po­si­tional power. In addi­tion to reveal­ing how peo­ple feel on the inside, he cap­tures the exte­rior with a painterly sur­face marked by traces of the artist’s hand.
The viewer can’t help being pow­er­fully struck by Nielsen’s extreme open­ness to a plethora of visual influ­ences, from Gia­cometti and Picasso to Lip­chitz, Lau­rens and Bran­cusi, not to men­tion more tra­di­tional modes of Euro­pean sculp­ture. His work is also about myth, mean­ing and move­ment. Com­bin­ing the great cross-cultural tales and themes of human­ity with the tech­ni­cal skill of the sculp­tural mas­ters, his work aims to cap­ture the defin­ing moment when time­less sto­ry­telling, pro­found sig­nif­i­cance, and real­is­tic bod­ily move­ment intersect.

www.gesager.com/