Once in a decade, a rare botanical phenomenon occurs in California’s Death Valley. As the spectacular outcome of an unusually wet rainy season, large quantities of wildflower seeds that have lain dormant deep down in the desert soil meet the right conditions to germinate, sprout and blossom. It is a superbloom. Intuitively, the idea of a blossoming desert seems contradictory. As a botanical impossibility, it is in radical contrast to the general perception of the dry and infertile desert landscape. Yet it is surprisingly real.

A similar exercise of creating visions of contrasting ideas that question our sense of authenticity lies at the heart of Danish-Brazilian artist Andreas Albrectsen’s work. Revolving around a conceptual approach to drawing, Albrectsen examines the visual cultures of our time, their historical references and interlinked paradoxes – predominantly taking the internet and its embedded user experience as his theoretical point of departure. With his use of digital images from operating systems, search engines and social media, the drawings spring from the screen landscape but are also physical manifestations of ideas and time. The manual accumulation of time is also very present in Albrectsen’s drawing technique. Through a slow, meticulous and extremely labour-intensive translation process, Albrectsen masterfully transforms the digitally pixeled image into a pastel drawing, always maintaining a strictly grey-scaled palette. In his works, Albrectsen uses a particular dry pastel powder, which he grinds into fine pigmented dust and applies to the paper with repetitious, gentle brushstrokes. This technique enables the drawings to encapsulate a porous and desiccated expression – a texture similar to the feel of desert sand. This subtle associative relation is something Albrectsen likes to emphasise in his work methodology, always trying to draw symbolic parallels to the medium and the materials he uses.

For his first solo show at Anita Schwartz Gallery, Andreas Albrectsen presents a new body of works consisting of three large-scale pastel drawings, each an impressive size of 140 x 218 cm. They were all produced in Rio de Janeiro during a three-month residency. The drawings present slightly different versions of a picture-perfect desert landscape used as a desktop background on a computer screen. Conceptually, the works combine elements of the still-life genre with a digital desktop environment, creating a modern-day vanitas.

This juxtaposition is notably present in the two drawings Untitled (Folders IV) (2022) and Untitled (–) (2022). At first sight, there is something peculiar about the compositions of the white documents and folder icons that hover together on top of the pastel powdered desert desktop. The accumulated icons form undefined silhouettes, sharply contrasted against the porous and shadowy dunes. In Untitled (Folders IV), the delicately outlined composition – abstract as it may appear – refers to the iconic Northern Renaissance oil painting The Ambassadors (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger. The double portrait is considered a forerunner of the later style known as stilleben or more popularly called Nature Morte (dead nature). Another element that stands out is the hourglass. As an archaic measurer of time and a classical memento mori symbol, the tool is reduced to a pixelated cursor stuck in space between mediums. As an actual container of sand, the hourglass relates to the desert scenery and the dust grains from the pastel-covered surface.

Untitled (–) (2022) also references a classical still life painting: Cornelis Gijsbrecht’s Trompe l´oeil. Letter Rack with a Barber-Surgeon’s Instruments (1668). Again, the folder composition appears as an apparition in the desolate wasteland. On the left side, Albrectsen has implemented a small icon resembling the digital tool of the magnifying glass, indicating the action of zooming out – a common metaphor for a non-present mental state of being. In computer terminology, the folder icon is referred to as a User Interface Metaphor (UIM) and is designed to trigger immediate recognition. Ironically, these UIM icons now represent obsolete and historicised objects, far away from the immaterial and contactless reality of the present day.

In Untitled (Poof) (2022), this ghostlike sense of disappearance or digital erosion is also present. In a similar uninhabited desert scene, a singular white cartoonish cloud, digitally designed and attached to an arrow-shaped cursor, hovers over the dunes like a genie. The icon represents the disposal of an unknown screen element, evaporating from the desert heat and into the ‘trash’. Keeping in mind that computer screens consist of 70 percent silica sand – a primary component of Silicon Valley offices – Albrectsen makes a connection with the sand of Death Valley and that of our digitalised office culture, drowning us in endless online scrolls.

When looking at the three drawings installed – sparsely and widely spread out in the space – one cannot help but draw parallels with the surrounding white-cube architecture and the internal metaphor of the desert. As in nature, the viewer must walk a certain distance to look closer at the objects appearing on the horizon, but by doing so, the viewer might walk towards something that was never there in the first place, awakening this unreal feeling of a distant, surreal mirage.

Albrectsen’s new body of work is not so much a reminder of the transience of life as it is a comment on the eternal presence of our avatars and personal information that will live on forever digitally. Like the visible void surrounding a photocopied page, or the monotone grey desktop display from early Macintosh operating systems, Albrectsen’s drawings remain haunted by their contextual origin. But just as in the process of mass reproduction, the generational loss of information over time eventually allows for an alternative and more autonomous visual presence.

The seemingly inexhaustible container of symbolism that the desert and its aesthetic theoretical framework represent becomes Albrectsen’s muse as he digs deeper into and around its evident internet analogies. Throughout the history of philosophy and literature, not least in postmodern rhetoric, the desert landscape has been the object of hundreds of metaphors and tales of dystopia harbouring an overall sense of philosophical immanence: the desert as arid wilderness, a site of geographical extremity, a sacred and biblical place, the birthplace of man, a metaphor for infinite standstill, of solitude and hopelessness, an existential terrain, a speculative topology (Nietzsche), a site of deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari), an object of sheer, but dry, aesthetic desire.[1] 

It is within this context, and that of the superbloom – from which the exhibition takes its title – that Albrectsen makes his point. Comparing the endless internet search with the desert – an infinitely misleading place, with no maps or clear directions, a place that will consume you and leave you drained – there is an element of loss and melancholy in the drawings. By introducing the vibrant phenomenon of the superbloom, a natural outcome of the utmost ecological resilience, Albrectsen creates a sharp contrast, like a tiny rippling effect of excitement, suggesting the possibility of radical change.

* [1] Aidan Tynan, The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 1–3.