Ole Ahlberg – a true humorist

Ole Ahlberg’s painting has undergone a distinct development during the last few years. Whereas earlier his pictures were formed by the maxim “a picture in a picture in a picture”, like a set of Chinese boxes, now there is only one central picture surface, one central scene where the action takes place.
Thus Ole Ahlberg has abandoned his subtle illusionism in favor of a more “normal” painting. This hasn’t made his pictures any less enigmatic or ambiguous as he concurrently began making use of a one-color background, black or dark blue, like many of the Dutch Baroque still life artists employed. A background that appears even more inscrutable and mysterious in relation to the brightly illuminated objects in the foreground.
Ole Ahlberg has created a universe where the baroque vanitas symbols, such as peeled lemons, hourglasses, unlit candles, and skulls, have been replaced by a more contemporary repertoire. The most obvious difference being between things and people from the “real” world contra comic strip characters. His many scantily-clad women, swans, porcelain objects, and clouds are painted in a very convincing life-like manner while the comic strip characters, mainly taken from Hergés’ Tintin, are painted with a clearly defined outline that makes them appear flat on the canvas. A difference that is almost tangible.

More Magritte than Dali

If Ole Ahlberg’s principles of composition have changed, his motifs have essentially stayed the same: it is mostly still about eroticism. Being a very sophisticated artist, he never allows the pictures to become too lewd or carnal in nature, but somehow he finds a way to get the viewer, to a great extent, to create the suggestive stories. Eroticism is usually also just a pretext for political commentary and a deeper epistemological investigation. In this respect Ole Ahlberg prefers the black humor and mysteriousness of Magritte than the theatricality and surrealism of Dalí.

One dismantled Pope

The most significant motif in Ole Ahlberg’s artistic universe is the dichotomy between different representations of innocence and sexual practice as it occurs in the real world; a sexual practice that reveals innocence either as a fabrication or a religiously founded hypocrisy.
This hypocrisy emerges particularly through Ole Ahlberg’s regular use of the Pope in his pictures. According to the Roman Catholic teachings, the Pope is, by definition, innocent. As pontifix maximus he is not only the bishop of Rome, but also the direct successor of Peter and, in this capacity, can settle all matters of faith and is deemed infallible. However this only happened as late as 1870. Ole Ahlberg’s enjoyment of depicting Johannes Paul II is only enhanced by the Pope’s notorious opposition to all types of contraception. Plus, though being relatively liberal on human rights issues, the Pope is a staunch conservative; you could say reactionary in his position on equal opportunity, rights for homosexuals, and free abortion. This is why we see a cigar-smoking, shrewdly-smirking or satyrically-sniggering Johannes Paul in the company of beautiful, young, and tempting women in french lingerie. Ole Ahlberg shows us the head of the Church as a person of flesh and blood with urges just like the rest of us. One sanctimoniousness, dismantled and deconstructed by the artist.

There are swans and then there are swans

The snow-white swan swimming majestically around in several of the pictures is a more romantic symbol of innocence. The large monogamous bird has been used in both literature and the pictorial arts as an image of purity, often bordering between the real world and the hereafter. As we know, Hans Christian Anderson utilized the swan as an effective symbol of the writer who had to experience the trials and tribulations of the cruel world before attaining his true station as praised poet. Contrarily, Ole Ahlberg’s proud swan doesn’t encounter loving and innocent children but a very earthy variety of love, preferably with a risqué sadomasochistic content. Here the artist makes it very clear that the symbolic swan has little in common with real swans, and is just that, a symbol, created by people’s need for self-righteousness and transcendence.

Poor Tintin

If the toys Ole Ahlberg often places in his pictures are a solid symbol of innocence, then it’s a different matter when it comes to the figure of Tintin, who has become a kind of trademark for the artist. For Tintin is a completely fictitious person. Plus he’s a very special type, one where you don’t find even an inkling of a love life in any of the comics.
With the exception of the opera-singing, bosomy Milanese nightingale, Bianca Castafiore, women are by and large missing from Tintin’s universe. Even the heavily drinking and constantly cursing Captain Haddock shies terrifyingly away from Castafiore’s advances, which are more a publicity stunt than a real declaration of love. Ole Ahlberg places this quite unusually virtuous comic strip figure in situations where he is confronted with very corporeal and scantily clad earthy women. With great wonder, or should we say shock, Tintin stares at the forbidden fruit. His facial expressions, often taken from episodes in actual comics, reveal that all this eroticism is completely alien to him. As though it came from another planet. Ole Ahlberg, leaving no room for doubt, emphasizes that Tintin is a fictitious person by depicting him using Herges’ sharp, black contours in contrast to the rest of the paintings clair obscure.

Not spelled out

It is, however, also interesting that eroticism in Ole Ahlberg’s paintings is rarely spelled out for you. In one of the best Tintin paintings we see the young journalist incredulously regarding a red space rocket (from “Destination Moon”) placed under the skirt of a beautiful woman. Ole Ahlberg only presents us with a gaping Tintin, a rocket, and a woman’s lower body, thus enticing the observer to become a co-creator by conjuring up the erotic exploit from his/her own subconscious. Here the artist draws on the age-old truth that the most sex-fixated people on earth are the puritans, who can find sexual references in even the most innocent motifs. All because they refuse to acknowledge their own sexual urges. And for exactly that reason Ole Ahlberg has the whole Tintin-group after him because they mean he is exploiting the plucky journalist. An army of lawyers is well underway trying to figure out a way to get the better of this impertinent Dane who is so impudent as to exercise his freedom of artistic expression.

Sexy porcelain and exploited fishermen

Ole Ahlberg is a very refined artist on another level also. In his “mussel-painted” series we see, for example, a Royal Copenhagen cup’s blue pattern duplicated on a woman’s bared skin whereby her body losses a good deal of its threatening eroticism, while conversely we discover the likeness of form between the beautifully well-balanced cup and the soft, womanly curves. The Royal Copenhagen porcelain suddenly becomes rather sexy. The body and the cup change places.
In his “Skagen” series, where Ole Ahlberg uses and reuses motifs from the married couple Ancher and P.S. Krøyer’s famous paintings, he has a somewhat different approach. The fact that Ancher and Krøyer’s paintings, just as Monet’s water lilies, have been completely consumed by mass-produced tourist souvenirs has almost made us forget how truly good the originals are. They have become a kitschy idyll in the same way the Danish tourist organisations will present a naïve, fond of children, and sentimental Hans Christian Andersen to us in 2005. Michael Ancher’s heroic fishermen have similarly lost their innocence a long time ago on the altar of marketing. And when Ole Ahlberg places a fisherman in his pictorial universe it is specifically as a parody and a protest against this commercial exploitation of the true Michael Ancher.

In this respect we are dealing with an all but one-dimensional artist who makes us smile and laugh, loud and liberating. Yet at the same time he is a person who has a solemn message for us. A person and an artist who will reveal the sanctimonious hypocrisy that characterizes parts of the United States and the Vatican where fundamentalist Christians are trying to bomb us back to the Middle Ages using extremely prejudiced, undemocratic, and antirational policies. As we can see, Ole Ahlberg doesn’t mind directly confronting us with our own prejudices and aversions. He holds a mirror in front of us that we can choose to look into or turn our faces away from, but it is hard to ignore it. A trait that without a doubt denotes a true humorist.

By Tom Jørgensen