Johan Deckmann: Just About Enough

Johan Deckmann is a Copenhagen-based artist and practicing psychotherapist who understood something early in his career that most people take a lifetime to accept: the things we find hardest to say out loud are usually the things most worth saying. His art is built entirely on that understanding.

The book pieces began when he was reading Sartre one afternoon and realized he could reach more people through five words on a cover than in an entire therapy session. He made the first piece that day. A decade on, the work has traveled to New York, London, Tokyo, São Paulo, and Rome, and it has found its audience because that audience recognizes itself in it immediately.

He has said he wants his works to be like mirrors. This room holds up a particular kind of mirror, one that reflects not who we are trying to be but who we are when we stop trying. That is the harder thing to look at. It is also the more valuable one.