By Torben Rølmer Bille
Kulturkapellet (The Cultural Chapel)
July 3, 2024

(A rough Google translation)

Perhaps you have tried going to an art museum, but instead of simply wandering around among the exhibits and sculptures yourself, you have followed an art guide around or overheard what is said in connection with such a tour.

Although there is something really fantastic in experiencing the immediate expression of art yourself, there can also be a lot of advantages in having explanations, backgrounds and different stories attached to the works, so that they thus gain an added value when you look at them.

A short time ago, the very beautiful “Still in Play: Torben Ulrich's paintings” was published. It is a 4-kilo coffee-table art book that summarizes Torben Ulrich's many years of work as a visual artist in 120 images.

Torben Ulrich is perhaps best known as one of Denmark's most unusual tennis players, music reviewer, musician and, not least, father of Metallica's (annoying and hammer-handling – ed.) drummer, Lars, and since the 1970s he has also worked with a visual, artistic expression. An art that is strongly inspired by both his interest in Buddhism and of course his many years in the world of sports.

For those who have never heard of Torben Ulrich before, what was special about his tennis game was that he had an actual philosophy about it. For Ulrich, it wasn't about who won, but more about how the game was played. In this way, his game can be well compared to the ancient Japanese archery tradition Kyudo, where the important thing is not necessarily to hit the target, but to achieve harmony and immersion as you draw the bow, control your breathing, feel your body, etc.

As written in “Still in Play”, this approach to the sport of tennis is probably also a contributing factor to the fact that Torben Ulrich has not ended up in the Danish Sports Hall of Fame, because the idea that it is mostly about being involved does not harmonize well with the competitive mentality that is prevalent in the sports world.

When you look at Ulrich's pictures, without any prior knowledge of them, they often seem very similar. There is not a great deal of variation in the motif choice, which usually consists of some black, curved lines that sometimes cross each other, other times stand alone and almost always with a red, round spot added either in front of or behind these black lines. The backgrounds also vary. In the earliest works it is completely white, but later in the man's production, one could both sense a grey-blue net structure, as a supplement to the aforementioned elements, or even later you see these simple motifs being digitally transferred on photographs of brickwork or clouds.

Immediately, Ulrich's pictures have quite a strong calligraphic tone. At first glance, they may resemble Japanese scrolls or a few, single characters painted with a broad brush, with the artist's signature red stamp as a contrasting punctuation mark for the work. However, Torben Ulrich has not used a brush when creating his pictures, but rather rice paper with a skipping rope and tennis balls soaked in paint.

The book's title “Still in Play”, like the works, has a wide range of meanings. Partly a comment on the fact that there is a game going on, a play with the figurehead and the expression, partly that Ulrich's art is still relevant, and partly it is also a sports metaphor. In the same way that the title is ambiguous, so is Ulrich's art. If you are interested in getting up close and personal with what the deeper layers of the man's 'action painting' are, then the book gives you – in addition to the many beautiful reproductions of the pictures – three longer texts. In the same way as the aforementioned museum guide, they can add several extra layers of meaning to the images, by looking at them afterwards.

The first essay, “Ball, Body and Being”, was written by Lars Movin. The text is reproduced in the book in both Danish and English and is partly a review of Torben Ulrich's artistic life and comments on the creation of the book. In particular, this introductory text focuses on the philosophical thoughts behind art. Thoughts that are also repeated in a somewhat more abstract form in Torben Ulrich's “Circling the Uncatchable”. This text is, for reasons that also appear in the book, exclusively reproduced in English.

In the reviewer's eyes, it is the right choice to let Movin's text be the first, because once you have read it, there are far more things in Ulrich's own text – which was written specifically for this book publication – that make sense, even if it still remains quite difficult to relate to as a lay person.

The last text is Jens Tang Kristensen's “The Ball in the Picture” (which, like the first, is available in both English and Danish). Kristensen's text is both the shortest and most concrete of the three. It would be unfair to try to reproduce the many thoughts that underlie the works of art and the way they have been made in this forum, as the undersigned's attempt to retell the general points of Ulrich's philosophy would by no means capture all the nuances.

There may be those who may object that pictures should be able to speak for themselves, that it should not be necessary to be explained what the artist has thought or meant about his things. That may also be partly true, but in fact there are a lot of both cryptic, fascinating and esoteric considerations behind the images and their creation. Elements that, when you become aware of them, really provide an added value when you take the time to study the images closely.

The information contained in the three texts obviously changes the way in which art is subsequently viewed. Even if the immediacy that each of the images expresses on the viewer who does not know the philosophy behind the works might disappear, the words add another kind of immediacy that precisely points to the fact that Ulrich, in his own way, tried to capture the very present, the moment, not to mention the play, the game and the sport in his artistic work.

If this sounds very abstract, perhaps it is. On the other hand, both the words and especially the many paintings you can see in the book are really good. Although the images may seem very similar at first glance, the charm is perhaps precisely the subtle changes that can be traced from one series of images to the next. The pictures can easily be perceived as the result of a lifelong series of meditative, repeated actions, where chance, combined with physical forces, the location of the canvas in space and, not least, a playful approach to the world are united. Unfortunately, Torben Ulrich died on December 20, 2023 and therefore never got to see the finished book. On the other hand, we who are still in the world of the living can still get great pleasure from his pictures and not least his very last essay about life and art and art in life.