Seeing Shadows

 

By Dennis Geronimus

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January 2019

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Some years ago, during a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I came across a group of children, no older than five or so, gathered in front of one of the collection’s less obvious, talked-about marvels. There they sat on the floor, eyes wide, before Frans Snyders’s Still Life with a Bust of Ceres, transfixed by the painting’s wreath of fruit, vegetables, and grains, framing a bust of the Greek goddess of agriculture and summer. Bursting with color, Snyders’s painted illusion once cheered a dormant Baroque fireplace, while its virtual goldfinch, woodpecker, squirrel and mischievous monkey peek out of the cornucopia to add an element of surprise, then and now.

 

Overseeing the group of curious young visitors was an animated docent, who sought to bring the painting to life by gently encouraging his captive audience to draw nearer and look closer. What do you see inside this painting? he asked. Can you name the different kinds of fruit, vegetables? A host of little arms shot up. “Plums!” piped up one child. “Lemons!” shouted another. Peaches, grapes! The kids’ sense of excitement was palpable. I couldn’t leave the scene. More children contributed other fruit varieties, leaving few unpicked – that is, until a girl in the back, who had her hand up for some time, whispered something quite unexpected: “I see shadows.” Now, this child is surely going to grow up to be an artist (or art historian), I thought to myself! Over the years, I have come to know an artist whom – certainly in spirit – I like to imagine as once a little girl seeing shadows, that which is hidden in plain sight, where others only see the obvious.

 

Signe Kongsgaard Mogensen has been drawing for almost as long as she can remember – since she was three years old. “To me it was a world, a silent space, to which I would withdraw and where I would stay for hours and hours, alone, drawing worlds,” Signe tells me. “The sensation of the pencil on the paper made me calm. And it still does (and doesn’t) but drawing has a heartbeat, a steady rhythm.” Fast forward to the summer of 2017, Signe and I find ourselves standing in front of Fra Angelico’s Madonna of the Shadows, adorning the upstairs eastern corridor of the Florentine convent of San Marco. Lined with frescoed cells once occupied by Dominican monks and young initiates, this dormitory space still feels like sacred ground. Signe bends down to examine the faux-marble painted panels, streaked and speckled with variegated color – a brilliant display of painterly virtuosity – located below the devotional painting’s main visual field, occupied by its heavenly participants. At once seemingly random yet tantalizingly suggestive in their abstract forms, the painted slabs are a kind of spiritual surrealism. Signe is spellbound. She peers so closely that her nose almost hits the protective glass, covering the mural’s wall surface. Not long after our visit to San Marco, Signe confided to me that she has come to see her own drawings as a kind of inner cosmic “marbling.” I would like to think that she may have had Fra Angelico in mind when making this beautiful visual metaphor.

 

It was, in fact, Italian Renaissance art that first brought Signe and me together. Our introduction came in 2010, a time when I was beginning a book project on the painter Jacopo da Pontormo. As it happened, Signe’s MA thesis in Denmark was on the Florentine master’s late drawings – the most enigmatic of his career, if not in all of Tuscan art at this time – and we quickly formed a bond in our mutual fascination for his ghostly images.

 

Signe and I remained in touch over the years that followed but it was not until two Aprils ago that I had a chance to see her own drawings. Signe arranged the first viewing with great care – an occasion almost akin to a ceremony, given my own level of anticipation – in an empty architect’s office above the hustle and bustle of Piazza della Repubblica. The second viewing took place, auspiciously, in the library of the NIKI. Like glimpsing Pontormo’s haunting late sketches for the first time, the experience of encountering Signe’s large sheets at different stages of completion, their fate still uncertain, is one that I will not soon forget.

 

Signe kindly invited me to contribute this Introduction because, in her words, “I know [her] and [I] know the drawings.” “I trust your eyes,” she said. How could I possibly refuse? was my immediate reaction. I feel privileged to have gained Signe’s special trust, for the drawings that I first had a chance to view and discuss, alongside their maker, were nothing short of a revelation. Now displayed on the walls of the Institute’s Aula, a number of Signe’s most recent creations – once altogether faint, unborn, when I first glimpsed them – emerge as no less delicate, still in the act of becoming, but wholly present. They beat with life.

 

Given her background as both a visual artist and art historian, it is no surprise that Signe has drawn on a wide range of sources for inspiration. Her work has developed from her interests in science, literature, poetry, and the visual arts. Signe’s conceptual and technical ambitions have grown gradually with time, in parallel with the physical dimensions of the drawings themselves. Throughout, her work has been about duration. In her own words, “My work is a very concrete way to deal with time. Drawing is a deep rhythm, a kind of sewing, a way perhaps to unfold time’s intense matter.”

 

Her working process is slow and deeply contemplative, akin to a kind of layering. Rather than using separate sketches, Signe integrates searching marks and erasures directly into the image itself, gradually moving toward a discernible form. One work sometimes springs from a former one, arising from material left over from before but which, now appearing on a new, blank sheet of paper, slowly evolves and becomes a new, independent work. In this way, drawing becomes a refined medium of sight and memory, in which big, yet seemingly weightless forms are transferred to paper by pencil marks, layer by layer, in a process of induction. “My work revolves around that which appears slowly and can hardly be perceived, if at all, in real time.” Signe continues, “It is about something that grows with stubbornness, and yet is fragile. I’m interested in examining the slow layers of a human being, of the very material of being human.” In truth, Signe’s drawings are less drawings than living, pulsing organisms. From their origins as barely-visible germs to forms pregnant with meaning – mutating, liquefying, ripening, splitting, doubling, and finally coalescing before one’s eyes on/in the paper’s white void. At one moment reminiscent of human cells, at others of molecules or some other living stuff that is altogether alien, her embryonic shapes seem sensible to their existence in the world. The drawings are conspicuously self-contained – intimate yet at the same time carrying immense worlds themselves.

 

While visibly fainter, tilting somewhere between absence and presence, her most recent drawings betray an unmistakable sense of movement. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there is now a hint of precociousness to her life forms, as some appear to sneak toward (and escape beyond) the borders of the page that contains them. Signe’s work before 2010 was markedly different from the efforts exhibited in Living Forms, however. Her earlier drawings evolved as distinctly two-dimensional processes on paper. Using Signe’s own words, they had a “microscopic, ornament-like character”. Their dimensions, too, were rather small, sometimes very small, measuring 10 x 15 cm, if not less. One could discover details best by examining the surface through a magnifying glass. In fact, Signe realized some of these earliest efforts by using a magnifying glass in the drawing process. “When I now look at those drawings,” she recalls, “it’s with wonder, a strong feeling of anxiety and perhaps even claustrophobia. I guess I perceived them more like tiny fragments of something enormous, not as forms or finished entities. I did perceive a kind of life [in them] yet those drawings were like something knotted up in my brain rather than something actually breathing. The fact is, form at this time didn’t interest me as much as did the sign.”

 

A shift occurred sometime around 2012. Since then, Signe has become increasingly interested in and occupied with questions of form, while working on an increasing scale. “I guess my art matured in silence, somewhere in time. We often know things before we know them,” she reflects, “and the drawings teach me things. They teach me how to see, or about seeing itself.” It was only upon seeing her finished sheets displayed on the wall, as a series, that she discovered that every drawing actually had a body of sorts – that “from some angles, it really was three-dimensional.”

 

Each drawing is subtly different, an individual being. Yet all share a common sense of tactility, even a sculptural quality. “Over the last four years in particular,” Signe notes, “I have worked on a longer series of works and have been occupied with how the drawings have come to imitate the formal language of sculpture, while at the same time remaining closely connected with their original graphic function and material reality: that is to say, the graphite marks on paper, the line which is at the same time color and material. To me,” she continues, “my drawings are actual sculptures. They are also paintings – or they are also sometimes sculpture, sometimes painting. I have a very strong, happy feeling in my heart when, suddenly, I have this phrase printed in my mind: The drawings are free, they can do whatever they want! They can be painting, they can be sculpture, they are, of course, drawings, but they can be all in one, these strange forms and sudden openings.” After all, Signe asks, black and white and the almost infinite grey tones in between, aren’t they colors too?

 

Often questioned as to why she does not paint or reimagine her graphic forms in color, she responds in words as only an artist (or poet) can: “Painting materials do not speak to me personally, materials do: chalk and bones and ashes, coal and stones and air and bonemeal and light, holes and cotton and marble, and broken marble sculptures, pieces and fragments, edges, openings. And soft paper skin and human skin are the most clever and sensible materials ever. And also the words interest me, ‘marble,’ ‘mouth,’ ‘ashes.’ While working on one particular drawing, the word lysfrø, or light seed/seed of light, appeared in my mind, as a tiny white seed-like form emerged in the middle of the sheet – a word that then became lystand, literally ‘light tooth’!”

 

Signe’s process, as one can well imagine in witnessing her works in person, is intensely painstaking, requiring exceptional patience, quiet – and, again, time. “It’s clear,” she explains, “that the working process begins a long time before there is ever a form on the paper. Until there is a form, something to start working with – an outline at least – I am, in every sense of the word, homeless: that is, placeless.” “There’s something very important there that I still can’t define and hardly can even talk about,” she admits. “The only thing I can say is that there is a strange knowledge there when I’m working on a drawing: I have to forget it to remember it.” Embodying this secret knowledge, Signe’s drawings have now emerged out into the world for the first time. Ten of her more recent creations, all dating to 2015–18, have found a new home at the NIKI. For this experience, we have to thank the Institute’s Director Michael Kwakkelstein, a friend to very many art historians and artists over the years, without whose support and belief the present exhibition would not have been possible.

 

At last, Signe’s private imaginings have found a public audience. I suspect her evocative forms will linger in the viewer’s imagination long after the show closes. In the opening chapter of his Ways of Seeing, the late John Berger memorably wrote, “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” Whenever I engage anew with Signe’s drawings, I am no longer certain as to what I saw before.

 

In my conversations with Signe, it has become clear to me that she has found a balance in her own right between the private realm of image-making – the silence of the studio – and the public realm of language, visual and spoken, that is now all her own. Symbiotically reflecting Signe’s trajectory as an artist, her drawings, too, contain a multitude of impressions and experiences within them: Signe’s life in rural Tuscany and in urban Copenhagen, her gardening and walks around forests and lakes, her reading of a wide variety of texts, her close looking in various art collections, from the Nivaagaard Malerisamling to the Palazzo Strozzi – and afternoons spent in fifteenth-century Dominican convents. Signe’s art practice has grown from each and every one of these experiences, her ephemeral visions a testament to the power of change in their own suggestions of constant flux, of remembering and forgetting.

 

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Dennis Geronimus

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Professor and Chair

Department of Art History

New York University