The painting of the young Dane Oliver Bak

Two pale figures emerge, barely visible, from the fragrant, morbid poppy bouquet in the muted color palette of gray, blue and purple tones. Back to back, the profiles of the ethereal spirit beings stretch longingly towards the light between the delicate flower heads. The pictures of the young Danish painter Oliver Bak, who is exhibiting for the first time in Germany at the Berlin gallery Sprüth Magers, appear too beautiful to be true and completely out of time.

Six of his paintings and one sculpture are enough to evoke the symbolist spirit of the fin de siècle at the end of the 19th century. Artists such as Odilon Redon with his iridescent mists of color and the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt with his ornamental opulence seem to be the forefathers of the 32-year-old Dane, who was born in Copenhagen in 1992 under the “light of the north” and has certainly also internalized the grisaille painting of his compatriot Vilhelm Hammershøi.

A pale grey greyhound

Unlike his predecessors, however, Oliver Bak stands out with thick layers of wax and pasty surfaces that are repeatedly reworked and layered. As if from a cloudy mist of beeswax and oil paint, his ephemeral aerial creatures emerge between the petals, seducing with subtle color sensations. While the pale gray “Greyhound Ghost” in the portrait format of the same name merges with a kneeling figure to form a kind of double being, a kind of Ophelia rests beneath the violet sea of ​​flowers in the painting “Violets Banquet” to the sound of a Pan’s flute. Here the shadowy breath of life, there the sweet sultriness of decay.

The French Nabi artist Ker-Xavier Roussel, whose mythological paintings of fauns and satyrs chasing nymphs were recently rediscovered in the Michael Werner Gallery, was also completely out of time and forgotten. As with Roussel, the question arises with Oliver Bak whether the untimeliness of his paintings stems from a nostalgic escape from the world or whether his beauty-obsessed paintings capture something that concerns our present. Is he a wrong-way driver who, tired of life, drives against the forward-moving direction of the avant-garde or a crowned anarchist who can allow himself any freedom?

Death under rose petals

The rhetorical question of the exhibition title “Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist” is probably more likely to be answered with both/and. In any case, it refers to the myths of the boy emperor Heliogabalus, who with his excesses and orgies became synonymous with the decadence of the late Roman Empire. He evidently stands for the Dionysian combination of beauty and terror, pleasure and suffering, to which Oliver Bak devotes himself in his ambiguous pictures. Their ambiguous and morbid aura has a famous model in the Victorian painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema “The Roses of Heliogabalus” from 1888, which shows a feast of the boy emperor in which he suffocates the unsuspecting guests under a fragrant wave of rose petals.

The French actor and poet Antonin Artaud also dedicated an eccentric novel biography to the late Roman ruler in the early 1930s, which rebelled against the world of his own time with its powerful language full of violence and exaggeration. Whether fin de siècle, 1933 or the present: the reference to Heliogabalus is borne by an apocalyptic feeling and awareness of decadence, which in Oliver Bak’s case may be directed against the beautiful appearance of the digital Instagram world with its beauty filters and operations.

The clay sculpture “Poppyhead” also reveals how Janus-faced the beautiful surface of his art is, because one half of the face of the lying head is made of dried poppy capsules, whose intoxicating effect spreads like a rampant ulcer.

The visitors were only too happy to be seduced by the profound beauty of his work, because the exhibition of the newcomer, who graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts only a few years ago, was sold out even before it opened.