Undone sketches

Intentions, ideas, notes, projects, plans, diaries, memoirs, registers, archives or simple sheets of paper… Our life, our thoughts, our dreams often exist in writing – and sometimes only exist as written traces… Drawers and other containers are filled with them. To this we can add the attempts, the aborted projects, the impossibilities… The confrontation with a reality that does not want to emerge or that collides with the eternal lack of time. Not to mention documents with such sensitive material that they live in the shadows… until the day when…

The artist Peter Martensen handles all these notebooks, diaries and loose paper sheets – including his own – in a very concrete manner: he started painting and drawing them transforming them into landscapes, endless accumulations. In these compositions, Mankind is sometimes shown on the scale of books and notebooks; he is sometimes as big as a giant or as small as a Lilliputian. Ideas accumulate, get forgotten, just as ignored words of wisdom, trampled projects and truths too truthful, but the notebooks remain…