bjarne werner sørensen transitions june 4 - july 29, 2022
elizabeth harris gallery 529 w20 st new york city

Transitions

The works in this exhibition bring into focus oil painting in its traditional form. The works are all the same size, but they appear very diverse in color and composition. There is a solid core, a body and other elements that sprout from this form. The compositions of the paintings are central and are twisted and turned throughout the process of painting. When painted from the one side, the paintings are then rotated and ultimately worked on from all the other sides.

These paintings are based on a basic experience of perception of motion, and become an interplay between chaos, energy and order. Scattered and gathered at once, they form an organic geometry as if put in a constantly changing formula. The brushstrokes and the encounters between the colors are visible, and highlight the concrete physical process in the painting. The works cycle between the immediate tactile sense of the materiality, and the involuntary wanderings of the associations. One experiences space opening behind the surface.

The paintings are abstractions. They do not portray anything immediately recognizable. Stressing movement and contrast, the gesturally applied colors and forms make for compositions imprinted with a variety of natural phenomena. The tangled lines and convoluted planes that cover the canvas represent, if anything, inner forces of nature.

Nature is any involuntary development and transition; an endeavour that has no awareness of being bound by time or limited by space. If the tree knew its final height and shape, it would hesitate over every twig because it would constantly be measuring itself against something already established. It would wither.

Nature offers an example of the indefinite. It has no consciousness of its beginning or end. It proceeds, it exists. Its cessation is bound only to time, so it cannot be predicted or postponed.

Improvisation is an unfolding of nature. Exploring nature without being taught, as a continuation of matter unfolding. Improvisation becomes an extension of the exploration of nature into consciousness: nature coming back to itself.

The Danish poet and philosopher Per Højholt (1928-2004) wrote in the final paragraph of his essay Cézannes metode (1967): Art, like everything else, is of no use, but differs from everything else in that it can be a part of our life on conditions we have not set ourselves. By formulating an interval, it gives us the opportunity to experience that we exist.

Text compiled, translated and adapted by Bjarne Werner Sørensen