Into The Melancholic Truth of Leonardo Christian Anker Amadeus Vandal
Leonardo Christian Anker Amadeus Vandal (nomdeplumeonline) is a danish artist living and working at the artist residency Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy.
Vandal is a multidisciplinary artist who works across different mediums, often integrating performance and texts into his installations. After studying tailoring and philosophy, he started using art as a therapeutic practice in order to investigate the depths of his unconscious through highly personal work.
“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept the mystery.”
- Jane Campion
Drawn to various and often unusual media for their symbolic potency, Vandal engages in a dialogue with the past. His work deals with notions of universal balance and contrasts. It strives to reunite the opposite forces and knock over the discomfort of uncertainty.
“The world is so simple, there is no good no bad, everything has become a relative truth”
- Vandal
Even if his pieces are often highly formalist, the romantic essence is always at the core of his creation. Natural materials such as reeds, earth, and tree roots reference both time and patterns of life, death, and decay.
“The vessel or sculpture is as well a hiding place for the soul, a disguise which tell a different tale to each viewer, as the flowers in a vase is watered by the imagination … A physical abstraction of the human mind”
- Vandal
All images courtesy of the artist
