Kristoffer Akselbo

Mona Lisa Toast

The bread you bite into at Karriere is one of Kristoffer Akselbo’s artworks. The Mona Lisa, the most famous of all portraits, is burned, as a dark shadow image, into the toast served with breakfasts and brunches. Leonardo da Vinci’s painting is ubiquitously reproduced – gracing postcards, jigsaws and lampshades. There seems to be no end to its proliferation. In Akselbo’s work, canvas and paintbrush are replaced by mass-produced toastbread. As such, it is a piece of Pop Art in the style of Andy Warhol’s oft-reproduced silkscreen portraits of superstar faces from Hollywood and the art world. Hollywood and art history deliver the overarching frame of reference for Kristoffer Akselbo’s works. The Titanic, Tom and Jerry and Jurassic Park are just some of the blockbuster narratives he spins works off. They include a glass of whisky whirled into a maelstrom (Malt-strom, 2006), a wastepaper bin that emits a curious rustling noise from down among its contents (Jerry, 2005), or a coffee cup on the window ledge that registers subsonic tremors as vibrations on the surface of the coffee (Jurassic Java, 2006). The works inject a whiff of mystery into the predictability of everyday life. A touch of the extraordinary that you only normally encounter in film or literature. The works capture fugitive moments that offer a brief glimpse of the world in a whimsical, fantastical light. Drawing on the culture’s rich store/culture’s cornucopia of images and stories, Akselbo’s works insists on the role of aesthetic and narrative approaches in gaining a deeper understanding the world around us. On one side of the piece of toast, we have the Mona Lisa, and on the other side nothing. The elusive smile is a dark shadow in a slice of toast soon to crumble. Now you see it, now you don’t. (PKE)

Kristoffer Akselbo, born 1974, Denmark

• Kunstværk