Soft Collisions

During his residency at the ISCP in New York in 2002, artist Bjarne Werner Sørensen (b. 1960) not only immersed himself in painting, but also found new ways to express printmaking as it entered the digital age. Through the digital process, the artist rediscovered and expanded his understanding of printmaking. Since then, he has been able to apply these processes to his painting, which is linked to the movement of form and color on the surface. In this way, Bjarne Werner Sørensen has created a link between the possibilities of the digital space and the sensitive craftsmanship that has characterized his painting, which throughout his career has been more or less associated with abstraction and nature, where the organic fabric of the image is allowed to unfold on the canvas.

In Bjarne Werner Sørensen's work, a rigorous and disciplined expression is revealed through testing the substance and material of painting. His work relates to what emerges and develops within the possibilities of the format. Perhaps his experience with printmaking and digital color printing has led him to work through his compositions in a serial manner. In recent paintings, a kind of organic structure can be seen and experienced within the 80 x 60 cm format. Paintings with titles such as Tide, Stream, and Wind speak volumes about natural phenomena that have become focused investigations within a fixed framework through the painterly and luminous use of color. Perhaps the space of the painting in this case is related to an underlying certainty about the grid of New York City: That despite the people, the life, the forms, the chaos, the dissolution, the density, you need clarity. In painting, as in life, you have to be able to find your way.

Bjarne Werner Sørensen has had many destinations in his life. Copenhagen, the Faroe Islands, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Thailand are places he lived in his childhood and youth, and his work as an artist has taken him far beyond Europe. His many residencies and exhibitions in New York City have been particularly significant. The city is a melting pot of political, social and aesthetic influences from around the world. During this year's American residency in the International Artist Program of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA), several new paintings were created. Since arriving in New York on April 2, he has experienced extraordinary natural phenomena such as the April 5 earthquake and the April 8 total solar eclipse at a country house in Vermont, which the artist describes in an email: "The light faded but was strong and the temperature dropped. It got dark. And all of a sudden it happened! You could take off your glasses and look around in a kind of ghost light.  It was all orange on the horizon, probably from where the eclipse didn't reach. And looking up at the sun and the moon gave a very physical experience or sense of time. Oddly enough, there was also a view of Jupiter and Venus on either side of the sun. I can't describe the experience. But after about 3 minutes, the sun would come out again, and it would take some time for it to get back to its full strength".

New York City is always the here and now for the observant. It is a city of Zen, if you are aware, and the artist's sense of his surroundings is unmistakable. There is a poetic presence attached to both visible, sensual, and abstract forms and phenomena. It is no wonder that the title of Bjarne Werner Sørensen's latest exhibition is Soft Collisions. The paintings are the result of a physical presence in the world, of choices made where lines, shapes and colors hold us for a moment in the midst of the floating cosmos of the universe.

Erik Steffensen, May 2024

Erik Steffensen is a danish artist, writer and art critic. Born in 1961.
He was professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1998-2007.