Henrik Olesen Dissects Isidore Isou’s Legacy

At the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 20 of Henrik Olesen’s paintings hang in conversation with six postwar works by Isidore Isou – the somewhat obscure, overshadowed founder of the French avant-garde movement lettrism, which used letters and symbols not as a linguistic medium but as meaningful visual forms in their own right. Olesen’s engagement with the Kunstmuseum’s collection for the exhibition ‘Demons Are Tearing Me Apart’ extends his ongoing analysis of the male ego and autonomy. What emerges are tension-filled gestures of abstraction and didacticism, with subtle nods to reduction inspired by the principles of lettrism.  

While Isou’s work remains resistant to meaning, it is steeped in enigmatic symbolism. Take Les Nombres (X) (1952), a painting that synthesizes lettrism’s devotion to the iconographic. The white canvas is populated by stray blue letters and words alongside pseudo-hieroglyphic icons – the talons of a falcon grasping a branch, a child sleeping, the star of David, Eve feeding an apple to a snake – making for an almost Freudian composition of memories and scenes. Isolated red smears and blotches punctuate the canvas, creating a sinister, crime scene setting that disrupts any given associations. Avoiding interpretation, Les Nombres (X) is indicative of Isou’s illustrative oeuvre: a lexicon that purposefully charms and confounds.

In comparison, Olesen’s painting Hey Plasticity (2025) bears a clear announcement on the upper left corner: the work’s title is written on a piece of masking tape – a recurring material across Olesen’s canvases. A further trace of ripped tape with indecipherable lettering exists on the right – perhaps denoting something left unsaid or partially edited away. Smeared painting butter beneath the words renders an abstract mess, akin to a swatch test or study of decay. Here, the surface is layered with flesh tones of varying opacity, grime and fingerprint smudges, evoking a texture of ejaculatory viscosity that reflects the artist’s conceptual analysis of the male body. The painting depicts the trauma of the repeated but failed attempt rather than any kind of polished storytelling. 

Olesen further draws on Isou’s narrative reticence through gestures of redaction. Artistic strategies including covering, scraping, layering and mimicry suggest linguistic or physical allegories that aim to inundate or evade. The two abstract paintings Materials: Tongue and Digestive System (both 2025) embody Isou’s influence more overtly. Materials: Tongue, for instance, has the late artist’s name scrawled onto a piece of tape, which is then overlaid on a red, glistening form redolent of the titulary organ. Digestive System reveals a coat of thick crimson paint over which sheets of transparent film with sprawling black marks have been layered. Resembling a failed x-ray, the work unfolds through automatic processing, offering up its meaning without conscious effort or intent.

By contrast, Isou’s painting, Untitled (incrustations en blanc) (Incrustations in White, 1961), is largely illegible, densely layered with thick cream paint in which incomprehensible characters have been carved out. A curious mix of Latin, Cyrillic and invented script is rendered in repeated swoops and overflows at the edges. It is clear that some distant, inaccessible text played a central role in its construction, yet now the indecipherable surface feels suffocating. Decorative, demanding and pompous – it participates in the monolithic genius mythos that Isou and his contemporaries often embodied. 

But this postwar patriarchy and modernist dialectic is precisely what Olesen is drawn to deconstructing: the desire of wanting to be seen and heard but not deciphered or questioned. Where Isou offered esotericism and obfuscation, Olesen is direct, albeit still operating within the language of precarity and abstraction. To evoke Isou is not merely to meditate on language’s faults, but to examine our own internal understanding of modernity. 

Henrik Olesen and Isidore Isou’s ‘Demons Are Tearing Me Apart’ is on view at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, until 18 January 2026

_{Main image: Isidore Isou, Untitled (Incrustations en blanc) [Incrustations in White], 1961, oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm. Courtesy: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz and © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich}