Everything is beautiful.
Pop is everything.
Andy Warhol

The true path to creativity
is to burn
out.
Jean-Michel Basquiat

It is mainly symbols and figurations derived from the American underground culture, which Frederik Kløve Jacobsen uses in his pop-art inspired paintings. Thereby they seem different from the remaining, Danish contemporary art. In Kløve’s versions of art in the 21st. century, Tom Waits’ shabby Frank-figure trudges out the door, the alcoholic cult writer Charles Bukowski is still hanging about in the bar – or the Statue of Liberty is going down with the American flag.

Kløve Jacobsen’s expressive joy of painting and disrespectful, confident, cultural "hacking" remind you of the American picture- and cocaine junkie Jean-Michel Basquiat’s imaginative paintings from the 80s. The black artist hero exceeded the limits laid down by visual art and made graffiti-inspired paintings, which immediately fascinated Andy Warhol, the king of pop-art.

Less radically than Basquiat, Frederik Kløve Jacobsen also presents intense hacker-paintings. They contain explosive outlets and are often populated by images of blinded flies, giant egg-shaped figures, cartoon figures and black musicians. In his effort to create new and unique samplings, the Danish artist steals left, right, and centre from the commercial and popular culture’s infinite amount of icons.

Armed with cheap spray cans, broad brushes, ready printed figures of rubber laminate, adhesive tape, red iron clubs, and fat, expensive acrylic paint, Frederik Kløve Jacobsen aggressively attacks the large canvasses that are fixed to extra strong stretchers. Often with Soundgarden, Nirvana, White Stripes, Miles David and Sex Pistols as inspiring background noise in the studio.

With inspiration from Jackson Pollock’s drip painting technique, he frequently lays down the painting in the middle of the process and intuitively throws paint on the canvas. When the painting is subsequently raised, the aqueous paint runs down the surface and provides the painting with a vertical direction. Then, the motif is adjusted by adding lines and words such as "INC", "OXE", "EXIT", or entire sentences as for instance "Jack is resting by the tracks of a past innocence", which refers to the child’s innocent childhood.

The pictorial quotations in the expressive paintings are often referential objects such as Betty Boop and Taiwanese toy cars. Or else the signs are graffiti tags with a political content, such as the crown and the saxophonist, which are probably borrowed from Basquiat’s staged rebellion of the 80s. And exactly because the borrowed signs have a special meaning, Frederik Kløve Jacobsen’s sampling differs from the exhaustive and depthless, post-modern method of acquisition. At least in the way that it finds expression in the American pop- and conceptual art, where the purely formal quotation is dominating.

The paintings cannot just be assimilated to the well-known discourse of post-modern art, concerned with the death of the individual and the levelling quality of consumer culture. The criticism of the controlling art institution presented in the personal paintings is too obvious for that. Especially since the Danish artist repeatedly inserts a standardized, commercial pictogram of a snobbish judge in his paintings. A know-all censor who turns his judgemental look on the artist and on us.

By Henrik Broch-Lips,
art historian and art critic