ASGER CARLSEN
Ordinary rendered odd
13 February 2017
There’s something wrong with Asger Carlsen’s work. The Danish photographer’s smoothly fused collages of melting human forms, awkward prosthetics, multiplied features, dripping digits, hirsute faces, and disembodied appendages offer a take on the grotesque reminiscent of 70s and 80s sci-fi horror films. Here we have a sublime potpourri of Carpenter’s The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, cult 80s horror Society and pretty much any Cronenberg. It might have you hiding your eyes at first, but its guaranteed the more you look, the more you’ll want to see.
Carlsen’s nudes might easily have earned some extra cash as life models for Francis Bacon. Yet these pristine black and white images have an effortless precision about them that renders the unnatural and deformed completely normal and immediate. Carlson’s humour is cheeky, dark and lusciously absurd. Snapshot-style pics show freakishly ordinary-rendered-odd characters going about their freakishly day-to-day business in freakishly normal surroundings, each one a sumptuous cliffhanger leading to the next. Carlson’s work leaves you with a true thirst for the disturbing, simultaneously quenching it and causing it.