Søren Behncke: Rainbow Mountain

12 jun 202114 aug 2021

That Rainbow Mountain. It probably looks more rainbowy once you swipe it through an Instagram filter. Maybe Clarendon, Juno or Mayfair? Adjust brightness, contrast, structure, warmth, saturation, colour, fade, highlights, shadows, vignette, tilt shift and sharpen. Then it might look like #rainbowmountain. The Vinicunca, Winikunka, Montana de Siete Colores or Rainbow Mountain – a 5,200m peek in the Andes of Peru. The rainbow coloration stems from different environmental conditions and mineralogy when the sediment was originally deposited, and the subsequent diagenetic alteration. Hidden from mass tourism and mountainous fame until the mid 2010s when the glacier caps that had previously covered the rainbow spectacle for thousands of years, melted away due to global warming. The absent line between travesty, comedy and tragedy. That Rainbow Mountain was already there, hibernating under natural white camouflage.

When the mountain involuntarily appeared in public domain, Søren Behncke realized that it was indeed already there. He had pulled the figure out of the primordial shape soup many years ago, studied it in many forms and courted it in various settings. It appears here in the exhibition as the wings of a bat – painted on a DIVINO blueberries cardboard box from Peru; the light from a lamp in the bright painting Orange of Arabia; in the sculpture of the hat of hats; the painted smoke from Georg Baselitz’ inverted cigarette; the fireplace in Atelier Calder; in the chest of a cardboard sculpture of a minotaur; in the candles burning on Debussy’s grave painted on a pizza box; in the street lights of the painting Disco Dubuffet, and in a large pink and blue painting of Le Corbusier’s table next to his cat and pipe. Behncke refers to this study and development of shapes as “shape rhymes”. From runes over contemporary artists to mundane observations, he has developed a distinct alphabet of shapes. He paints them, draws them, prints them, sculpts them, filling notebooks full of “shape rhymes”. A way of seeing and communicating the world beyond verbal or written language. We can identify ancestral sentiments in these shapes. Ancient and contemporary, that Rainbow Mountain.

Kilde: V1 Gallery