PANORAMA
By Mai Misfeldt
Bjarne Werner Sørensen is both a reflected and a restless man. He speaks slowly and searchingly. It is as if the conversation could go in many directions, and as if deep inside he is constantly deciding on its course. He is also a passionate and persistent man, a person who continues to grapple with his works until finally he can let them go. In his works you sense a calm, yet slightly heavy existence. There is a lot of body and presence in them, yet it feels like they are constantly trembling agitatedly. As if suddenly, like an iceberg, they could disappear beneath the surface of water, before slowly rising again, transformed.
The house in Froðba, Suðuroy, Faroe Islands
In the small settlement of Froðba on the southernmost Faroese island of Suðuroy, Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s family has a house. It is allegedly the oldest settlement in the Faroe Islands, and it was here in this king’s farm that his mother was born in 1924, the same year her father had taken over the lease as a king’s farmer. Personally, Bjarne Werner Sørensen has not lived in the Faroe Islands. He grew up on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in Beirut, which at that time, prior to the civil war, was a liberal, modern city. He went to school in Denmark, while his parents lived for periods of time in other places in the world. However, the Faroe Islands represented a permanent place far away on the horizon, somewhere to return to. It was something special and extraordinary and at the same time, by virtue of his mother’s background, a kind of primordial home. You could call the Faroe Islands a matrix. Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s mother died in spring 2017. I imagine that it is significant when the person in the family, who was the direct link to the country that in many ways is part of Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s identity, disappears. That the loss must also entail thoughts about what the relationship to the country meant, and what it will be like in the future.
Arrival From a Distance. Oil on linen, 65 x 80 cm. 2017
Bjarne Werner Sørensen has not painted with oil since 2002. But now he has returned to basics. To canvas and paints in tubes. To a slow dialogue with the painting. The new paintings have powerful colours and are very direct. There is something casual and nonchalant about the way one layer of colour encounters another. It is all about colours encountering one another. In the painting, a colour is never just something in itself, it always relates to the other colours. A green becomes a different green, whether it wraps around a cadmium yellow or borders a burnt umber. It is both incredibly banal and incredibly complex. It is an elementary exercise, in which the path of the process can show what is working. At the same time, it is essentially a kind of philosophical exercise. Who are we when we stand alone? Who do we become when we stand next to our immediate family?
In his paintings, Bjarne Werner Sørensen works with several layers, which seem to jostle with one another. Sometimes, it seems clear that he has placed an extra grid over the surface. On other occasions, the relation between the inner and the outer layer is not clearly legible. You could imagine sort of secret wormholes between the two layers, which could suddenly reverse the relationship between them. There is a rocking, swinging sensation in Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s pictorial universe. It is as if there is nothing to stand on, and that you are looking directly in or down into a world, where nothing is ever clear-cut and where there is no solid foundation.
Motion Through Time. Oil on linen, 100 x 80 cm. 2017
His paintings are abstract. They do not portray anything immediately recognisable. The patterns evoke cells, seashells, pupae and cocoons, the flaming orange artificiality of lava against a grey mountainside or, in more physical terms, pulsing intestines. You get a sense of body in your encounter with them. The organically sinuous formations suggest bodily imprints, as if there were something behind the painting’s outer skin, pressed against the surface as if it were a panel of glass. The bodily dimension of the paintings is important for the artist. They must not be so big that he cannot easily twist and turn them throughout the process. When he has painted from one side, he tackles the painting from the other side.
This layering is a technique, which Bjarne Werner Sørensen acquired from his work as a graphic artist. From the very beginning his work has had two strands: painting and graphics, the latter in the form of lithography and digital printing, with which he has worked extensively. In Panorama he has chosen to keep this strand open by showing a work from 1998, Matrix, which is an exploration of the opportunities offered by combining several lithographic stones in a print. The work consisted originally of 105 lithographic variations on the same basic motif. A matrix is a mathematical grid-like structure, but the word also applies to a mould (mother shape), out of which other shapes can emerge.
Matrix Installation. Photo from the exhibtion Panorama, North Atlantic House, 2017.
Lithographs each 50 x 34 cm. Unique variations. 1998
On one end wall in the exhibition there are two works, which clearly stand out because of being punched out in a glossy, reflective, plastic material. They jut out slightly from the wall so that the play of shadows also becomes part of their appearance. The black and white framework is made up of matrices or Sørensen-esque basic shapes, and here they stand out distinctively with their hard, scale-like quality. The punched-out formations originate from some very early paintings, which subsequently shifted over in into graphics, ending up now as graphic objects. It is a range of shifts, as if a little tune first appeared in one form and is now incorporated into another. Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s work has constantly sprouted: one piece may be born out of another, and even contain elements from the previous one. Or, to put it maybe more accurately, a pattern may be extended and shifted, magnified, reduced or repeated, thereby engendering new works, which, so to speak, grow out of this basic pattern.
This agile way of working has its roots in inspiration from music, which has followed Bjarne Werner Sørensen from his early years, when he, the sculptor Bjørn Poulsen and a couple of others met up as 15-year-old boys at Bagsværd Boarding School and, through psychedelic experimentation and under the influence of jazz improvisation, decided to become artists.
Black Matrix and White Matrix. Each 200 x 150 cm. Lacquered qraphic objects. 2017
You also see this pulse in his painting. In the new paintings, it feels like he has gone closer, like he has got right inside the body, into cells and networks that rhythmically expand and contract. It is like a constantly aggressive dance and funnily enough the painting, with which several of the latest paintings have an affinity, is Matisse’s great La Danse (1909-10), in which a circle of orange dancers are moving over a blue and green surface. In Matisse’s case, what captivates us is the human figure. We see what it ‘represents’, we can talk about the picture, while the way it actually works in purely painterly terms is subtler, just like an abstract pulsating rhythm suspended between surfaces of colour and the movement of the shapes across the surface.
However, the immediate limitations of painting are spatial in contrast to the temporal limitations of music. Painting is in some ways more absolute. There is a frame, an edge, to which it leads. A pattern can, of course, continue in another painting, but within each work, elements must act as a world of their own making.
Space Trail. Archival pigment print. 163 x 130 cm. 2005
Today his impressions come from both improvised music and electronic music. The electronic music has inspired Bjarne Werner Sørensen to think of his works as parts of something larger: as patterns that can continue and mirror themselves in other patterns. Overall, the improvisatory music is a process of creation, which becomes an interaction based on equal parts of sensitivity and trust. You have to trust your fellow players and the element of randomness, which is hereby activated. You need to abandon your own fixed notions and seize what happens as a result of openness.
When Bjarne Werner Sørensen works on graphic art, he regards it as a form of improvisatory music. In this context, he cannot predict his fellow players: how the stone will receive the ink, how the colours will work in the final print, how the colour will attach itself to the paper. The joy of working on graphic art comes from being able to renounce some of the control and embrace the coincidence and error, which manifest themselves, and to play further on them. It is like a constant pulse in these works.
Gravity Shift. Oil on linen, 65 x 80 cm. 2017
When you see the photo of the columnar basalt from Froðba, almost unfolding like am enigmatic symbol, a bird’s wing, I think that the Faroese landscape has established itself like a kind of paradigm, a fundamental matrix in Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s mind. There is something he returns to. A year ago, Bjarne Werner Sørensen had a major exhibition in Listahøllin in Skipasmiðjan Tórshavn. He called the exhibition Tíðarrúm [Time Span]. That is because the exhibition was a sort of flashback, a study of the time and the pictorial space, he had moved through in the previous 20 years. In an exhibition, you show something to the rest of us, you share your artistic considerations with people who might just be interested. But an exhibition also does something for the person exhibiting. It becomes clear what the starting point was, what has been left behind, and what the basis for the future work is: where to stand, and where to jump from.
Kúlugjógv. Basalt column phenomena. Froðba, Suðuroy. Faroe Islands