Jasper Sebastian Stürup

Manual for samtidskunst (Manual of Contemporary Art). Lisbeth Bonde and Mette Sandbye. 2006

Jasper Sebastian Stürup (b.1969) is ideally occupied with the surface. he sprinkles and apply his refined artistic means on the white 'skin' of the paper is if it was makeup. With an almost unnoticeable ease he seduces us with his innovative use of the paper. It take a stabile hand to work this extremely controlled, as it happens in these works of paper. Stürup’s time specific expression is inspired of design and fashion. He uses photographs as a starting points and he uses the magazines as an extended archive of photographs, from where he samples traces and fragments of photographs, that he find to be useable for his work. Stürup's works on paper are marked by a sensibility and intimacy. They are fine as spider web and almost just like hints. they can have several layers, in that way they can open up into another room behind, or they can graphically speaking look like pictures of surface. Stürup graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in 1999.

In the three works on paper from 2001, Stürup has used as different materials as glitter, ink, paper in vivid colors, glue, spray paint and so on. There are to green pictures and one white with glitter. In the white picture the motif - three bonfires -appears in 'negative'. In the way where the empty paper is made by cutouts in the shape as flames, where Stürup has sprinkled glitter on the remaining paper, the motif is made by the space where the glitter didn't hit. The glitter changes from a light layer to dense and darker areas on the surface. It's an untraditional and almost urn materialistic way of portraying an element, there already is urn material - the fire - and at the same time Strürp works on the double play of the rays (here glitter), that isn't there, and only appear on the surface where there is no fire. In the green widescreen format picture, we see a hand that holds a glass. we see the hand and glass twice, from the side and from above. the motif are just an outline in ink, over laid with by a large blot, that runs over the paper - from right to left - opposite the general direction of the drawing. It looks like the content of the glass has spilled onto the surface and almost wipes out the motif. And Stürup's picture plays on the double, the construction is destructed by the motif. In the green high format picture, we witness a hinted intimate situation between a woman and a man. The woman has her back to us, and the man lies on his back, and reaches for her, trying to draw he into her arms. In the lower right corner there is a blod red figure that reminds of a diagram - giving associations to anatomic plates or something like that. The coupling of associations between the intimate situation and the red pattern - the blood - that is the highest symbol of love - is not to be mistaken.

Stürup almost work with a principal of dogma, every time he makes a mark on the paper with his pen or knives, tit's an act of no return, if he misses the work will be discarded. His idiom is characteristic it's expanding the category of paperwork. The fragile and crisp motifs are usually surrounded by east areas of empty, almost urn described paper, working as a 'wasteland'. It's an important part of his pictorial languages, it works as a kind of unarticulated field of possibilities surrounding the figures and shapes. Stürup's vocabulary is seeking and trying and not seldom teasing and with humor and foremost understated. You have to WANT Stürup's art because he almost whispers his messages, that seems to disappear on the surface. The pictures are dripping 'bleeding' sieves or vaporizes; at the same times it's marked with young and fresh energy, kept together by a tight and formal way of working. The main emphasis is put on the interior with a trembling line, it's almost like architectural drawings - but he also has a story that seems to be on hold in the middle of it. The pictures appears drip by drip - pice by pice.

Stürup has been in a long line of group exhibitions with his generation from in and out of Denmark. He has had two solo exhibitions at Galleri Susanne Ottesen in Copenhagen. As the case with many in his generation he's working in multimedia, also creating sculptures. Here he works with the amorphous shapes he cut away from the drawings, as a kind of making an independent move or as a 'leftover' from the drawings that works a a spacial communication with the drawings.

With his publishing company "Fluens Forlag" he works with a hybrid of the book, there both is a catalogue and an artwork in itself: either the books functions as documentation of his drawings or they are genius artworks as with the book "Svimmel" from 2000, there consists of drawings made with the mouse on the computer. The book is full of humorous things and is full of references and hints at narration. Stürup started to publish books because of the intimate that is created wile reading, and because they are democratic in they way they are accessible like a multiple unlike the more expensive artwork that can only be obtained by the few. That also goes for the paperwork's of Stürup.