Over in Copenhagen this weekend, James Ulmer is opening a new solo show, Situations, with the good people of V1 Gallery in their V1 Salon.
Ulmer draws inspiration from contrasting sources – from graphic novels, children’s toys, and commercial illustration, to Western art history, he joins a continuum of artists for whom painting is an exercise mediated through visualities reaching far beyond its legacy. Indeed, his works evoke something akin to the frames of a comic strip, each revealing a small, self-contained narrative populated with brightly coloured, one-dimensional humans in everyday scenes, jogging in the park, sitting by the dinner table, or gazing out the window. Devoid of facial expression and hovering amidst flat, graphical blocks of color, Ulmer’s subjects are purposefully generic – they seem to exist somewhere between the easy legibility of a road sign and the stylised, cultic symbolism of ancient art. Figurative painting’s historical purpose of chronicling quotidian life still rings true for the artist, yet straddling the middle ground between the immediately decipherable and the highly enigmatic allows him to complicate perception and introduce a surreal and unsettling undercurrent.