Oh, come a little closer/The Great Pineapple Show by Danish artist Barbara Amalie Skovmand Thomsen is a Nordic Tropical installation in blue tones, salt, birch wood and pastel colours presented in July 2011 at de Service Garage, Amsterdam. The nine-edged space of birch wood plates hosts a family of different pieces.  The room is a world apart, a whole of separate works. A huge misprint of a pineapple is printed on one of the walls. The pineapple appears in purple-blue shades and a few horizontal stripes of natural pineapple-colours, printed directly on the wood.


Another wall contains the photographic print Watercolours in which Thomsen stands by the Dutch shore with watercolours painted on her legs, continuing the seas horizon. The sound of the ocean is produced by the video There are two in a couple. Two clips, originally shot on super8, are edited together: the ocean and a close-up of Thomsen's parents whom she has glued together in the cold wintertime out on the moor of Jutland.


The total ground is covered with mint coloured salt that forms a mountain in the middle, Mint des(s)ert, and it smells of the sea. Two plants inhabit the salt, each with a plant-arm glued together in Sweet Touch. Two sugar cubes are placed on a small shelf in the lid of a crystal bowl, one presented, as we know it, the other one carved to a round pastille. Sugar Cube Ball or the internal gravity of the sugar cube is an association deriving from the fact that gravity has the effect on i.e. liquid metal that it acts as an attraction, which makes the metal pull itself into bullet shape.


And finally a postcard has been glued into a slit in one of the walls. At first glance it looks identical on both sides but in fact it contains a dialogue:

'It is only because you see me that I see you
It is only because I see you that you see me.'

Thomsen: 'I am looking for a state of intense healthy harmony as a fruitful mode of absolute presence and attention, a vivid moment. My Utopia, which can be reached, is a sense of togetherness, a different way of being. It is a quest for a brighter contact in our relations to each other and the world within and around us. Above all the atmosphere is important. It's the atmosphere of tension between the poles.'