05 may 2025, Yves Joris
Denmark: the beauty of what remains
Speed, noise and the endless advance of the digital shift are now inseparable from our world. Thankfully, there are artists who, like a small Gallic village, bravely continue to resist. Denmark, the pseudonym of Marc Robbroeckx, invites us to pause and reflect on what is at risk of disappearing: paper, the book, the fragment.
What we see in his work is not nostalgia, not a romanticisation of a lost past, but a radically quiet reflection on how we shape, lose and preserve knowledge and memory. In the Antwerp gallery of Stijn Coppejans, a world becomes visible in which silence speaks and fragility shows its full strength under the title State of Mind.
The slowness of paper
The exhibition space at Coppejans Gallery feels like a library without words. No monumental gestures nor aesthetic opulence, but the poetry of the disrupted book, the damaged page, the hollowed-out cover.
Denmark does not present images that aim to persuade. He does not seduce, but reveals. Paper is no longer merely a carrier of meaning, but meaning itself. The material speaks through its damage. What is torn becomes visible. What is missing becomes tangible.
Just as Stefan Hertmans in his reflective essays allows language itself to function as a vulnerable skin, Denmark does so with materials: what was once firm, certain, legible, is now shown as a wound. The gaps, the voids in his work are not losses, but places where the viewer must insert his or her own story.
Denmark, Dead Letters, 2020, COPPEJANS GALLERY
Books as scars of memory
There is something deeply moving about how Denmark treats books—not as sources of wisdom, but as traces of a human attempt at order. His installations show book covers without content, arranged like fragile architectures, like remnants of a civilisation that did not collapse through violence, but through silence.
Since the 1970s, Denmark has been working with these silent remnants. His first work, created during his student years, consisted of books rendered unreadable: knowledge withdrawn from the user, as a response to a world in which the amount of information was growing faster than human comprehension.
Today, in a world in which millions of digital data points are generated every second, his work feels more urgent than ever. He does not show what we know, but what we forget. Not what we preserve, but what we lose. In that sense, his books feel like scars: pointing to something that once was, but whose content eludes us.
Denmark, Artforum, 2019, COPPEJANS GALLERY
The beauty of the incomplete
There is a gentle discipline in Denmark's work. His interventions are radical, but never feel aggressive. He cuts, tears, folds and conceals—but always with an eye for subtlety. What remains is never mere waste, but residue that breathes and speaks.
In State of Mind, we find countless examples of this delicate destruction: fragments of sentences, shadows of typography, edges of once-complete pages. His assemblages of tightly folded pages, with snippets of text just barely visible, resemble flashes of forgotten dreams. We no longer read, we reconstruct.
Like a poet who works with blank lines and silence, Denmark creates meaning through absence. He makes the incomplete his core. His work is not meant to be understood but to be experienced—like a memory that surfaces, but never fully sharpens.
Denmark, Absolut library, 2014, COPPEJANS GALLERY
A mental space
The title State of Mind suggests not only a mental state, but also a space. It is an interior world in which traces, echoes and shadows of knowledge converge. There is no abundance of text or context. Nothing is explained, nothing is guided. Instead, there is breathing space: the visitor is free to look, wander, forget and remember. His work does not hang as art objects, but seems naturally present, as if detached from the walls.
And like memory itself, this space is changeable, layered, subject to erosion. There is a constant tension between what is visible and what is absent—a reflection of how our brains work. “Memory,” says Denmark, “is not what we hold on to, but what lingers after the content has faded.”
Against the grain
In his studio, where he has worked almost daily for over half a century, Denmark counters the frenzy of the world with slowness. He collects, organises, cuts and archives. He does not aim to preserve, but to reassign meaning. Books, newspapers, posters, magazines—all pass through his hands, transformed into silent witnesses of an overstimulated society.
That is where his relevance lies. In a time where information is abundant but shallow, in which algorithms determine what we read, Denmark shows the shadow side of knowledge: the excess that leads to forgetting. He does not pose easy questions—he offers a field of reflection. His work is not a protest or pamphlet, but a form of attention. In contrast to the speed of the cloud and fleeting nature of digital memory, he presents paper as a bearer of traces: vulnerable, tangible, finite.
Denmark, Parrot, 2009, COPPEJANS GALLERY
Vanitas without pathos
There is also something of a vanitas motif in his work, but stripped of pathos. Transience is not presented as a threat, but as a reality to be embraced. His parrots, his archived archives, his bundled remnants—they do not show what is lost, but what remains.
This makes Denmark more than just an artist. He is a thinker in images, a collector of remnants, an archaeologist of the present. His oeuvre is cyclical: not a straight line, but a loop in which everything can be re-examined and reworked. He transforms what is discarded into a new form of reading—and that reading is slow, thoughtful, necessary.
The power of a whisper
State of Mind is an exhibition that does not overwhelm, but slowly seeps in. It asks for nothing but attention. It displays nothing but the traces of what once held meaning. And it is precisely in that restraint that its power lies.
Denmark whispers where others shout. And it is that whisper that lingers—like a sentence you were almost unable to read to the end, but that nests itself in your memory.
Those who see this exhibition will not leave with a completed story, but with an open question. And perhaps that is the highest form of art: not to provide answers, but to create space for new thoughts.
Denmark, State of mind, COPPEJANS GALLERY
