Text and posters from 101 artists (2018) - 10th anniversary
Written by Tom Jørgensen, art critic at Jyllands Posten, Editor of kunstavisen
The fairy tale genre has become so steeped in Disney that it is automatically associated with stories where the main characters may have to go through a terrible amount, but in the end always end up getting the prince/princess and half the kingdom. We completely forget how creepy and harsh the Brothers Grimm could be in their stories, where there is certainly not guaranteed a happy ending. And even H.C. Andersen can be black and pessimistic. Just think of "The Shadow", Andersen's scariest fairy tale, quite modern in his depiction of a schizophrenic personality split.
It is this, more dangerous – and original – side of the adventure that Kitt Buch tackles with "Deconstructed Fairytales". Here the shadow is quite literal. The heroine, be it the clown girl or the mouse girl, is often seen as split in two. The joy and sorrow, the good and the evil, the innocent and the morally innocuous are woven together into one figure. On a personal level, Kitt Buch shows here how we all have shadows. How no one can free themselves from unpleasant character traits, wrong decisions and unscheduled actions. How we all have, to some extent, ills built into us that, in unfortunate circumstances, can be unleashed and awaken our inner monster, so that love is garbled, joy rejected and forgiveness scorned. In other words, Kitt Buch shows us that this inner duality is a human condition. It's up to us to make the right choices, do the right things.
However, the deconstructed can also be seen on a more general level in Kitt Buch's imagery. Paranoia, the search for scapegoats, aggressions, threats, duplicity and physical and psychological violence also set the agenda in the political and economic game, with perplexity, anxiety and alienation as some of the consequences. It is no coincidence that in some of the pictures we see the amphibary cloud of the atomic bomb towering up in the background.
So there is a good part of the original fairytale atmosphere in Kitt Buch's pictures. Both the fascinating, magical and whirring and the harsh, black and unsentimental. Behind the seductive flowers, adorable animals, hearts, love birds, killer clowns, slimy snakes, detached eyeballs and black climbers hide tales of us humans for better or for worse. About how we all have both loving and empathetic feelings built into us and at the same time the seeds of doing hurtful, wrong and evil things. Kitt Buch shows us as whole people: vulnerable, doubtful, loving, unbalanced and fearful. Sometimes it just takes deconstructed adventures to demonstrate exactly this. With its safe and vivid line and lush and unsentimental imagination, Kitt Buch has found its very own style and its very own place in the Danish art world.