There had been small packages arriving through the mail in the past months. Photographs of paintings by Knud Odde. I liked the idea writing about something. A musician a painter a man from Copenhagen. I wrote some facts memories from a conversation we had back then March til May 96. The facts got lost due to a technological mess. It did not feel right, reconstructing the reconstruction. The same thoughts did not reappear anyway. I let myself be led by chance. Pretty much how all had happened then...

I hadn´t visited Copenhagen for a few years. Today I could feel that feeling through those supergusty winds blowing in my face, above a brilliant sun. And the winds don´t stop. Love wandering the streets. All seems so steady, outlined on the outside. But even on Sundays, there are emotions there, stirred up with a knife. Filling the streets with desires and demons. Walking wildly. Art music design stuff all seems so interconnected. Everything is so nearby. Gardens, palaces, ships, democracies, collaborations, seascapes, libraries. I grasp, learn, outline. Just won´t stay one. Doublings, triplings of lineaments. So shaken up. A great moment for musicial transcriptions. A woman waiting to be clothed with sun. There is a tradition of realistic painting and of gestures. Looking for the outlines. Forces the gaze to cross all kinds of boundaries smoothly.

Sundays, the most quiet Sunday ever on one of my photographic strolls, I find the city plastered with many posters of a familiar image, a painting by Karen Kilimnik. Image: Portrait of a girl with a strawberry in her open mouth, an advertisement for "Unspoiled Monsters" a long-awaited record by the Danish pop-band Sort Sol. Black Sun. Knud Odde has been part of it for a very long time. Still holding memories.
Responding to constellations. Like the fact of Knud sending me some pictures of his paintings on paper.

A certain look there is. Memorials to moments. A hint of something baroque. Scattered islands of art. Relations to Karen: Recycling images of popular cultures. Not just Rock n´Roll any more but Search n´Search and Collecting n´Constructing and Step n´Store. Something can be found. Like that.

There are human figures as sites for desires and bits of luminous laziness. Falling failing falling. Held together by a certain lineament. Findings: vogueing on paper, posing up: Singer Henry Rollins of Black Flag, Giacometti, symbols of man. Old Pin Ups, old-fashioned stuff, groups of black musicians, and found words too... some debris from daily life. Crossing the boundaries of expectations both public and private. Doo Wop and Punk. Living on that that on desire and some flowers. Like in those great mannerist movements my gaze is intensified.

Never-ending soundtrack, wind as noise-music, back in my face. Face falling into the frozen grass. It must be found. Imagination is not dead. Oh, and then comes the light and then comes the sun. There is sensual enjoyment of elements with the gravitiy of a memento mori. There is funny dissonancing in the shape of the figurative. Adopted, borrowed, digested and turned inside out. There is a liking for outsiders´ attitudes, outsiders´ art and artists who have already processed that notion especially K. Kilimnik and R. Pettibone.

Offered: An image of an artist that faces a number of ways. It makes me want to transform the traversing into bursting. Makes me want to seek, makes me choose ease all at once. When it comes to art you won´t fight winds and passions.
Promise and passion sit in those pictures by Knud Odde: Promise of painting as doing something he always wanted to do and the passion that makes him do it in his own - pop-culturally multiple affected ways- like a back-up script of an artist-musician´s life in contemporary Copenhagen. Facts falling out of my head. Pushed to the heart of perception as an intimate participation. Hearing odd histories. Ayleresque. He did great things up North. There are some souls out there, man sailors of the world. Created by Copenhagen. I guess Odde (odd!) is one of them.
See you again, when I get there, Baby!

Jutta Koether. New York. 7th of March, 1999.