As Jim Morrison of The Doors famously opined, “people are strange”, and indeed it is arguable that to be human is to live with paradox – we often seek connection yet retreat into solitude; construct identities while wrestling with the projections of others and desire permanence while knowing, deep down, that everything is subject to change. For acclaimed Danish artist Kasper Sonne, these opposing forces at the heart of the human condition have provided inspiration for more than two decades. Early works witnessed him subject pristine painted surfaces to fire, bleach and chemical processes – inviting destruction to become an agent of creation – but in his more recent paintings that drive to explore instability has resolutely migrated inwards. His latest works may, on first glance, appear to have become more serene, and perhaps even ethereal, but they belie a troubled  psychological terrain. In the People Are Strange series, currently on show at Maruani Mercier, solitary, haunted figures stand beside oceans that reach for distant horizons, seemingly adrift within their own thoughts. These protagonists are recognisably contemporary, their clothes carrying the subtle codes of fashion, gender and identity, but they appear suspended in time, occupants of another  space entirely.

It is a displacement that seem the zeitgeist. We inhabit an era that promises almost limitless connectivity while producing profound experiences of isolation, and Sonne’s paintings seem to embrace, or in some way transmit the loneliness at the heart of modernity. The ocean that repeatedly appears throughout People Are Strange becomes an apt metaphor for the aloneness of being-in-the-world. Sonne grew up close to the sea and describes finding tranquillity in the horizon line, but also recognises something of his characters’ psychological condition in its unknowable vastness. Having lived in Berlin, London and New York before returning to his native Copenhagen, Sonne speaks candidly about a lifelong sense of solitude and never quite belonging. But rather than seeking to reconcile those contradictions, he has increasingly learned to accept them as constituent parts of the self. “I’m a work in progress,” he says, “and have come to appreciate that I will likely never reach a final conclusion as to who I am.” And for Sonne, perhaps that absence of conclusion is precisely the point, the human condition itself akin to Shelley’s Unfathomable Sea. In his interview with FUTURISTIC DRAGON. the artist talks about solitude and belonging, the seductive unreality of images, and tells us what painting might still reveal about the faces that come out of the rain.

Your earlier work often involved physically destabilising a painting. In these new works, the instability seems to exist within the image itself – in the figures, the landscape, even the light. Has destruction become something more psychological in your work?

Looking back at my work over the past 25 years, it has become increasingly clear to me that everything I’ve made has been an exploration of the human condition. While the concept of creation-through-destruction has become less easily identifiable in my work, it remains an idea at the forefront of my thinking. I view destruction as a natural, even necessary part of the human psyche, and a means for radical change. So my paintings are continuously made through a process of building up and breaking down, adding and subtracting. As such, my paintings are always the result of transformation.