Txt by Marie Kirkegård 2009

Rasmus Danø (1974)
Arcadia is an idealized landscape on the Peloponnese which already in ancient Roman times had its beauty and rural innocence described in euphoric terms. Endowed with beautiful temples and antique ruins of former riches, variations on Arcadia appear in poetry and painting through the years, drawn by the experience of an essential sense of time and melancholic satiety. It is possibly the most exalted shared European concept of landscape, though sometimes also treated with dissonance in the picture, where heavy monuments are deposited in the landscape, symbolizing the hand of time and an unbridgeable distance between the, at first, timeless and ideal reconciliation between nature and culture.
Rasmus Danøs artistic universe leaves no hope of an idyllic Arcadia either. In his scenery the unrest of the grave soon under-flows the noble relaxation, offering a wasteless wandering through dystopic landscapes. Polluted lakes, smoking volcanoes, closed walls and monumental gravestones bring forth a particular apocalyptic tension in the pictures.
Danø is a critical voyeur of a world and steps – often with a dissecting eye – into the dark, polluted and run-down backyards of the atomic age. This does not however result in an unambiguous form. Because deep down it would be a human centre of rotation, which prepares the ground for each and every subject, thereby balancing between a private and a general associative space: a space of forbodings, you could say. It shows among other things, the many facets that are set in motion in Danøs motifs.
In his charactaristic, slightly cartoonish style we are drawn into dyspepsic landscapes or urban utopias, where emotional expressions and asthetic traditions join with our own pictorial fantasy. Basically a closer envelopment of this concerns a search of the interesting schism in the European tradition: extremity and normality; culture and nature.
And in a further sense the dissolving of that schism. You could say that Danø sums up meanings and the loss of todays meanings, by juxtaposing and comparing the extreme with the normal. There is a constant discourse, which disturbs the waters and maybe it is that which creates the special unnerving twist in the fundamentally idyllic Arcadia.
By Marie Kirkegaard 2009.