Carl-Henning Pedersen : Flying colours

“What inspires me to paint – and to paint in the way I do? A painter prefers to let the paintings themselves be the answer, because it is limited what we are able to reveal about our unconscious state of mind. One thing I do know, however, to sit here in the Italian landscape, south of Siena – Campriano, surrounded by the magnificent Tuscan hills, gives me an inspiration which grows even more intensely by the knowledge that here, years back in time, lived the Etruscan people. Their art and sense for life and death touches my own feelings about art and life.” 

As a self-taught artist, Pedersen has always shown interest for medieval painting and sculptures of the Nordic tradition, played a large role in the development of the CoBrA group, and within this group it was Carl-Henning Pedersen who understood the importance of the connection between the present and the past, developing a pictorial language that acquired an original character in a very rapid manner. 

The figuration, that by some members of the group is abstract and deriving from dreams or the imaginary, is specified in identifiable shapes by Pedersen: the bird and the horse, man and woman, the sun and the moon, all elements that communicate between one and another the extreme reality but above all archetypal sign and symbols taken from the history of art. 
Referring to the medieval wall paintings in the Danish churches, in an article in the magazine “Helhesten”, Carl-Henning Pedersen explains not only to find a similar iconography to his in these paintings but also a gift of epic representation and the capacity of marvellous poetry that he felt was inside him. 

Pedersen has always been a prolific artist that from the beginning of his career has succeeded to generate a great marvel with his weaves of mythic cosmic figures and dreamlike creatures that have been present in his paintings and mosaic; his symbolism has always remained unsolved, an “imaginary” fairy tale of great visual and emotional impact.