Rene Sinkjaer’s exciting urban scene paintings are alive with dramatic colour, high energy, and edgy, contemporary metaphor.
Throughout art history certain themes recur to speak to the viewer both visually and psychologically. From Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” to Basquiat’s extravagant street paintings, the plight of man amid the evils and frenzy of temporal life is a familiar motif. Rene Sinkjaer portrays the subject anew with a dynamic blend of abstraction, expressionism, and urban street art – fresh and resonant for our time.
Titles such as “Urban Wasteland, Urban Clown, Human Folly, Let’s Drink for We Shall Die, and Thirty Years of Solitude”, (all large oils on canvas), leave little doubt as to the underlying themes of his work. However, while some titles suggest a certain pessimism and angst, the paintings themselves are not dark or melancholy. Rather they are wild, vivid spectacles, filled with colour and laced with cryptic (and overt) signs and warnings to the viewer, who if vigilant, might escape the consequences of human folly.
Many of the paintings contain layer upon layer of coloured marks, shapes, and brush strokes making the final picture so dense and complex that original words and meaning are buried and obscured. In these densely layered pieces, the paintings themselves can be seen as a metaphor for life lived on the surface, isolated from deeper meaning and purpose. So, too, they might represent the dizzying pace of change in urban life - the fact that today’s fads and inventions are built upon (and thereby destructive of) those of yesterday.
While there is a clear interest in content, along with aesthetics, in the last analysis what makes Sinkjaer’s work so compelling is his stunning, expressive use of colour. In addition to inbedded figures, word images, artistic, literary, and musical reference, the brilliant colours themselves carry strong, symbolic suggestion. In particular an exhilarating, luminous blue electrifies much of his work. Sinkjaer is a Dane, transplanted to Sydney, Australia in 2005. Is it any wonder then, that the intense and pervasive colour of water and sky is prominent in his paintings? Perhaps this blue represents a stability or constancy which offsets the overwhelming turbulence of the urban scene.
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