In the exhibition “Diet for a 1980’s Poet” Anders SCRMN Meisner presents a series of new paintings, inspired by the visual universe of the pop art movement. Trivial objects like cherries, grapes and apples are transformed into images charged with symbols of desire and longing, while simultaneously containing a latent melancholia, a sensibility emerging from each canvas and taking shape of birds or skeletons hiding under blooming sunflowers.

About the exhibition SCRMN states:

“I like to imagine myself as a kind of image eater, and I was surprised when I realized there is an actual term for this: iconophagy — the physical act of consuming paintings or scriptures, mainly associated with religious art. The connection between what we see and what we desire is indeed strong. So strong that we attempt to eat it.”

 
The idea of images being consumed may seem unusual, but Meisner's reflections are in fact rooted in a long tradition from Europe and the Mediterranean region, where, since antiquity, frescoes, icons and communion bread imprinted with images have been ingested in religious and spiritual contexts.

 
With the concept of ‘iconophagy’, Meisner invites us to reconsider the artwork; he challenges our conventional view of images as primarily visual phenomena. Meisner works from the premise that a painting can capture and transmit energy – a transmission from the artist's gestures into the painting and onward to the viewer – letting the encounter with the image take on the character of a sensory and almost physical transaction. In Meisner’s work, the notion of consuming the visual is extended to a symbolic plane, where images are metaphorically touched, tasted and ingested. Thus, Meisner himself assumes the role of a sort of image-eater, digesting pop-cultural references and personal memories to render them on canvas and thus forming a visual universe where the connection between image and desire becomes so intense that the painting is not merely looked at, but almost devoured by the gaze.

 
The exhibition’s title refers to Meisner’s own upbringing in the 1980s and the hunger for images that characterized his generation, as they learned, in the wake of pop art, that art and poetry exist everywhere. In Meisner’s practice, painting becomes a translation of the artist’s mental images and experiences onto canvas, through which he attempts to preserve some of the energy and emotional intensity associated with memory.

 
”Diet for a 1980’s Poet” is the image-eater's sustenance — an all-consuming, pictorial desire; a diet of emotional associations driven by the ambition that the artist’s own works, too, will one day be swallowed up by humanity’s endless hunger for images. 

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