One of the pleasures of travelling is discovering that the world is simultaneously enormous and improbably small.
Jeanne and I were sitting at Piazza Duomo in Pietrasanta, watching the afternoon drift slowly past sculptures, tourists, church facades and glasses of white wine under the Tuscan sun.
And then suddenly someone says: “Hej Martin.”
It turned out to be Thomas, a younger friend from Copenhagen whom I originally got to know years ago while wandering around and buying books in his former antiquarian bookstore in Skindergade.
A few hours later we were eating and drinking together with three young Copenhagen artists in the middle of Pietrasanta.
Pietrasanta has that strange magnetic quality. A small Tuscan town that somehow functions simultaneously as marble workshop, sculpture laboratory, café culture and temporary embassy for artists from half of Northern Europe.
The city itself almost feels staged for conversations like these. You sit beneath Bernar Venet sculptures and near churches older than most countries outside Europe, while people drift between foundries, marble studios, galleries and bars late into the night.
And perhaps that is one of the reasons art cities matter.
Not because they are efficient. Quite the opposite.
They create improbable collisions between people who otherwise would never have shared a table. A former Copenhagen bookseller. Young artists. Lawyers. Sculptors. Tourists. Locals. All temporarily assembled around wine, cigarettes, books, sculpture and conversation.
The algorithm would probably never have planned this meeting.
Reality still occasionally does a better job.
05/06/2026 17:27:40
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- One of the pleasures of travelling is discovering that the world is simultaneously enormous and improbably small.
Jeanne and I were sitting at Piazza Duomo in Pietrasanta, watching the afternoon drift slowly past sculptures, tourists, church facades and glasses of white wine under the Tuscan sun.
And then suddenly someone says: “Hej Martin.”
It turned out to be Thomas, a younger friend from Copenhagen whom I originally got to know years ago while wandering around and buying books in his former antiquarian bookstore in Skindergade.
A few hours later we were eating and drinking together with three young Copenhagen artists in the middle of Pietrasanta.
Pietrasanta has that strange magnetic quality. A small Tuscan town that somehow functions simultaneously as marble workshop, sculpture laboratory, café culture and temporary embassy for artists from half of Northern Europe.
The city itself almost feels staged for conversations like these. You sit beneath Bernar Venet sculptures and near churches older than most countries outside Europe, while people drift between foundries, marble studios, galleries and bars late into the night.
And perhaps that is one of the reasons art cities matter.
Not because they are efficient. Quite the opposite.
They create improbable collisions between people who otherwise would never have shared a table. A former Copenhagen bookseller. Young artists. Lawyers. Sculptors. Tourists. Locals. All temporarily assembled around wine, cigarettes, books, sculpture and conversation.
The algorithm would probably never have planned this meeting.
Reality still occasionally does a better job. (05/06/2026 17:27:40)
- There is something deeply reassuring about visiting a marble workshop in Pietrasanta.
Not reassuring in the nostalgic sense of “craftsmanship” as lifestyle aesthetics, but reassuring in a more fundamental way: the reminder that some forms of human creation still resist acceleration.
Some weeks ago Jeanne and I were lucky enough to spend time with the fantastic artist Kevin Francis Gray at his Marble Projects workshop in Pietrasanta. We shared lunch among dust, stone fragments, half-finished sculptures and machines that somehow coexist with techniques stretching back centuries.
Pietrasanta is one of those strange places where contemporary art and Renaissance infrastructure collapse into each other. The same mountains that supplied marble to Michelangelo still feed workshops producing works for contemporary galleries, collectors and museums around the world.
What struck me most was the tension in Kevin’s works between the digital and the physical. His sculptures often feel almost computational — as if a 3D model had melted, folded or partially corrupted itself — and yet they emerge from one of the oldest and heaviest artistic materials imaginable: marble.
In an age where so much culture risks becoming frictionless, weightless and infinitely reproducible, there is something almost radical about sculpture. Marble insists on resistance. Every cut is irreversible. Every mistake expensive. Gravity still matters.
And perhaps that is also why places like Pietrasanta feel increasingly important.
Not as museums of the past, but as reminders that technological modernity does not abolish material reality. It merely hides it from us for periods of time.
Very much looking forward to Kevin’s upcoming visit to Copenhagen in connection with the exciting new launch at Gl. Holtegaard.
Yes, I am aware of the irony of writing this on a smartphone while covered in marble dust. (05/06/2026 16:57:25)
- On the recommendation of Sara Malie, we had dinner at Il Trillo in Massa.
A place set slightly above the town, with a terrace looking out over the landscape — and, perhaps most memorably, framed by lemon trees that seem to belong as much to the meal as anything on the plate.
The food was excellent.
But what stayed with me just as much was the coherence of the place. Not in the sense of concept, but in the sense of origin.
The wines served were the restaurant’s own.
A white, Fucchia (2023), and a red, Massarolo (2020), both from Bertazzoli — produced locally, from the surrounding hills.
They were not “grand” wines in the conventional sense.
But they fitted.
Which is perhaps the more interesting quality.
There is something satisfying about eating and drinking in a place where the elements do not travel far — where the landscape, the view, and what is on the table are still loosely connected.
It is not a given anymore. (05/03/2026 20:30:51)
- Everywhere, there are sharp contrasts. Carrara is no exception.
On Piazza Gramsci stands a bust of Giordano Bruno.
The philosopher who insisted that truth could not be contained by authority — and paid for it with his life, burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.
A short walk away, in the tourist shops, you can find marble busts of Mussolini.
Carved in the same material. From the same mountains.
It is a strange coexistence.
The martyr for free thought and the symbol of authoritarian power — both rendered in marble, both reduced to objects, both available to be placed on a shelf.
Perhaps that is also what Carrara represents.
Not just permanence.
But neutrality.
The material does not choose. (05/03/2026 20:15:11)
- Jeanne had arranged for us to go up into the mountains above Carrara to see the marble quarries.
Which, in a way, completes the picture.
You see the marble in the city — in façades, in churches, in sculptures that seem almost detached from their origin. And then you come here, where the origin is anything but abstract.
Whole mountains being cut into.
It is striking — not just the scale of the operation today, but the continuity. That this has been going on since Roman times. That the same mountains have been opened, cut, carved, and transported — long before modern machinery made it easier to imagine.
Blocks of stone that would eventually become something like Michelangelo’s Pietà or Moses once started here, embedded in this landscape.
And still do.
There is something almost difficult to grasp in the idea that entire sections of a mountain can be removed, piece by piece, and redistributed across the world as architecture and art.
Extraction turned into permanence.
But standing there, it is also hard not to notice the reverse.
That permanence, at scale, leaves its mark.
The mountains are no longer quite what they were.
Perhaps that is always the trade-off — when something is made to last elsewhere, something changes irreversibly at the source. (05/03/2026 20:05:57)
- The last stop on Jeanne’s and my trip to Italy was Carrara.
A city quite literally built on marble — on the wealth that comes from extracting stone from the surrounding mountains and sending it out into the world, where it becomes columns, sculptures, façades. Permanence, exported.
We visited the Duomo, set slightly awkwardly — almost modestly — on Piazza Duomo.
From the outside, it is exactly what you would expect here: a beautiful, almost luminous marble façade. The material not just used, but asserted.
Inside, something else.
The cathedral was nearly empty when we entered. A few people scattered. Light filtering in. And then — unexpectedly — a piece of music that felt oddly familiar.
The final variation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
And suddenly, that small melodic turn that in Denmark lives on as Bro Bro Brille.
It is a strange moment — to recognise something so local, almost childish, embedded in something so canonical, in a Catholic cathedral, played on what sounded like a recording drifting through the space.
Bach, of course, was not writing for this room.
And yet the music fit.
Perhaps because certain structures — musical, architectural, cultural — travel more easily than we tend to think.
Or perhaps because we recognise patterns long before we understand where they come from. (05/03/2026 19:55:12)
- I also managed to stop by this year’s Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg yesterday.
As always, a dense and somewhat uneven experience — but also precisely because of that, a place where you can calibrate your own sense of what resonates.
I found myself returning to two works in particular.
Peter Rolsted’s Festens midtpunkt — a crowded, almost theatrical table scene where a single figure remains absorbed in her own quiet activity, seemingly indifferent to the surrounding celebration.
And Sigurd Lucca Weck’s Maskebal — more withdrawn, almost introspective, with its slightly unsettling masked figure caught somewhere between presence and distance.
What struck me, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a pattern I recognise in myself.
Again and again, I am drawn to works that operate within relatively given frames — painting, figuration, composition — rather than the many installations that dominate contemporary exhibitions.
Not because the latter are without merit.
But because their lasting value often seems more tightly coupled to the present moment — to a specific discourse, a political framing, or the logic of the exhibition itself.
Whereas the former, at least in the best cases, appear to hold something slightly more resistant to time.
Perhaps that is just a conservative instinct.
Or perhaps it is simply a question of where one expects durability to reside. (05/03/2026 18:44:41)
- There is a certain moment each year when the courtyard changes character almost overnight.
The Japanese cherry tree — now more than ten years old, and originally a birthday gift — suddenly moves from being part of the background to becoming the centre of attention.
Jeanne and I have, almost without deciding it, turned this into a small tradition. Marking the few days where it stands in full bloom.
It is beautiful every year. And yet never quite the same.
Perhaps that is part of the appeal — the predictability of the event, combined with the unpredictability of how it actually unfolds. Light, temperature, timing. All the small variables that resist planning.
There is also something slightly paradoxical about it.
A tree planted as something permanent, yet most striking precisely in its most transient state.
It does, admittedly, need pruning again soon.
Which is perhaps another way of saying that even traditions require a bit of maintenance. (05/03/2026 18:30:38)
- I just managed to stop by Gl. Strand yesterday to see Daddy Issues before it closed today.
I’m not entirely sure I bought into the premise.
Perhaps it is just me struggling a bit to follow the spirit of the time — or perhaps some exhibition frameworks try a little too hard to impose coherence on works that would be stronger left to resonate on their own terms.
That said, there is something genuinely rewarding about seeing so many young Danish — and international — artists gathered in one place. Especially when they are artists whose development you have been able to follow from their early beginnings.
It creates a different kind of viewing experience. Less about discovery, more about continuity.
I particularly enjoyed the three works by Magnus Andersen.
There is something both playful and unsettling in his universe — ceramic ducks, a pike, domestic objects slightly out of place — that resists easy interpretation. Which is precisely why I find it somewhat forced to tie them too tightly to a theme like Daddy Issues.
But perhaps that is also the point of contemporary exhibitions today: the tension between the work itself and the narrative constructed around it.
And maybe the more interesting question is not whether the theme fits —
—but how much we are willing to let it guide what we see. (05/03/2026 18:26:31)
- There is something quietly fitting about spending 1 May — Workers’ Day — in a concert hall.
Not in abstraction, but in the company of people whose work quite literally unfolds in front of you, in real time.
Jeanne and I spent the evening at DR Koncerthuset with Anne and Michael, listening to Beethoven performed by the DR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Antonello Manacorda, with Leif Ove Andsnes at the piano.
The programme moved through Beethoven’s musical landscape, but the centre of gravity was unmistakable: the Piano Concerto No. 3.
A work that feels almost architectural in its construction, yet intensely human in its expression. Andsnes played it with a kind of clarity and restraint that made the piece unfold rather than announce itself — controlled, precise, and quietly powerful.
It is easy to forget, sitting in a concert hall, how much work lies behind such an evening. Not just practice, but coordination, listening, adjustment — a collective discipline that is both visible and invisible at the same time.
Perhaps that is what made it feel like an appropriate way to mark the day.
A room full of people listening.
And a group of musicians working — at a level where work becomes something else entirely.
Yes, I am aware of the irony of capturing the moment on a smartphone.
But perhaps that tension remains: between documenting and experiencing.
And the question, still, of whether we know when to do which. (05/03/2026 18:12:28)