IMPRESSIONS

by Erik Steffensen

2017 marks the apparent painting comeback of the artist, Bjarne Werner Sørensen. This statement implies that at some point he left it behind. That is sometimes a wise choice, just as sleep serves as a kind of washing machine that clears our flow of thoughts during the night. He has painted for most of his life. He was born in 1960 in Kongens Lyngby, North of Copenhagen, and there is something restrained in his character and his painting. There is a tone of caution, even though the organic substance he releases onto the canvas is Nordic and dramatic on the outside.

View from School. Watercolor on paper 25 x 20 cm. 1973

When he was thirteen years old he painted watercolours with beautifully glowing colours, a far cry from the often naïve and youthful expression typical of his age. He clearly had a talent for colour from the very start; and for drawing and seeing, and following a rhythm; and for seeing the colours of autumn with a sensitive and emotional temperament. One watercolour depicted some houses, brickwork and roofs in the same warm, reddish tone, which we find again today in his painting. For example, he painted in the art class at Tjørnegård School, but, judging from the watercolour, he was far from the acid, blue-grey shades of suburban reality. Sadness is not the first word that springs to mind when describing Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s painting. Innate melancholy would be more fitting: a warm melancholy.

View over Beirut from the terrace in Rabieh. Photo by sister Lis , October 1965

Maybe this is due to the fact that he spent the first years of his life in Syria. The family lived on the coast and then moved to Beirut, living in a villa with allegedly fantastic views of the Mediterranean. Bjarne Werner Sørensen went to an American kindergarten and spoke American. Frequently, multilingual children are slightly reticent. They may search for words and appear thoughtful. Maybe this also applies to the way they approach painting. Slowly approaching an expression. Considering and expressing themselves in speech and imagery with double depth.

Froðba. Suðuroy. Faroe Islands. Photo by Sara Sørensen.

This is of course supposition. But when you add the adventure of living in a far-off country and, as a six-year-old, sailing back across the Mediterranean to Venice and driving the remainder of the journey north through Europe, your experience is perhaps more complex than that of most primary schoolers. What is more, his mother was from the Faroe Islands. So, from the age of eight, Bjarne Werner Sørensen would visit his aunts in the North Atlantic every second summer over a long period. The aunts lived on different islands in the Faroese community and the boy joined in the regular country life with local hunting and proximity to animals. Their mother could write, but did not have the creativity required to make a career out of it. When Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s maternal grandmother died in 1974, his mother took over her house, which had been a royal estate, because none of the sons wanted to take it over with all the commitments it entailed, and the farming operations were discontinued. So, the threads of his youth are easy to trace in the painting that was to characterise Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s work as an artist. As a teenager, he spent a year in the Faroe Islands (1977-78), where he also sailed on a longliner ship and fished. His artistic trajectory was established.

These upheavals and arrivals were a feature of the family. His parents moved from Denmark to Iran in 1975 where their son would visit them. In 1979, they returned to their homeland, before moving to Thailand, where they lived from 1982 to 1986. By now Bjarne Werner Sørensen was well under way with his artistic development. In the 1980s, he studied at the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in Aarhus, but frequently visited the Faroe Islands and became familiar with Faroese artists, and also spent six months in Thailand in spring 1986. In certain aspects, Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s paintings of curves and routes and destinations are reminiscent of Australian songlines. We follow some tracks that relate and cohere, but we cannot determine whether they are mental paths or actual paths he is using.

*Parameter Morphing.* Oil on canvas, 152 x 122 cm. 2017

In 2017, the culmination of all his influences is present in the artist’s work. Since his adolescence his trajectory has been stable, but with room for travelling and family. Bjarne Werner Sørensen probably never abandoned painting, but his constant and never-ending work involved installation art, decorative commissions and the graphic work, which has been a constant companion through all the years. He is a master of graphic expression in all its manifestations and is not afraid of tackling new digital approaches and coming up with new solutions. His work switches between quantity, seriality and individuality. Painting is the basis for all the work, but is also bound up with contemplation. It is clear that the movement of his hand across the canvas has been somewhat on the back burner for some years. In painting, there is no middleman. Nor do digital evasions or the many printmaking processes involved in the progression from drawing to print get in the way. Painting simply is, and there is no place to hide. If the mind does not keep pace with the expression on the canvas, the painting generally ends up as empty abstract symbols. Bjarne Werner Sørensen has made demands on himself: to convey his sensitivity in as unadulterated a form as possible. The etching and drawing in paper-cut-like versions are, like short Zen messages, invested with a clarifying, yet camouflaging layer of craftsmanship. Painting is a long and tedious process. Regrets can be seen and felt as uncertainty, small vibrating shades become dull on the surface, if the painter is not mentally present in the process. To put it another way: painting and graphic art are not the same. Bjarne Werner Sørensen rested on his mastery of graphic art, but without it turning into a pillow. But it meant a break from painting, which he apparently loves for its ambiguous qualities.

Hells Kitchen, 39th Street NYC. Print on paper 450 x 130 cm. 2002

He has always been fond of American painting, and this can be seen in the works that heralded a painterly breakthrough in the New York exhibitions, Seachange (1997) and Edge of Motion (2003). Last year saw the exhibition, Tiðarrúm in Tórshavn. Here the retrospective endeavour to find a standpoint, from which to look forward, was present in a number of the works. A banner-sized photographic print in two colours was displayed on the exhibition’s staircase: in many ways as an entrance to the oeuvre. In blue and black the photo depicted a street scene of Manhattan, which had been an epicentre for the turbulence of his artistic routes. Here, in New York’s grid, a picture of artistic effortlessness has coalesced. An unanchored painterly practice had found its place among the diverse creations of other foreign artists: a world painting, but also just a traditional painting with roots that suddenly seemed to make sense. As the Danish artist Asger Jorn put it, painting does not belong in the place from which it emerged, but very much in the place where it encounters response. And Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s nature is not only Nordic. He has tasted the world; his work has a complexity beyond graphic simplicity. In the new works, which Bjarne Werner Sørensen is exhibiting at North Atlantic House, painting has come into focus. There is a solid core, a body that works and other elements sprout from this centre. We can see that the effort to return to a centre of calm and harmony vibrates in the individual colours. There is no showing-off; just painting in its traditional form. It requires great courage to retain balance in this field. The courage to be unfashionable is the mark of a mature artist. Basalt and stone are probably inspired by the Faroe Islands, and of course it is evident everywhere in the artist’s work, but they are also simply beautiful shapes mentally perceived. Though with the intervention and return of oil paint in the work, it is not quite so simple. Here, the cleansed shape appears suddenly sober and alone and abandoned like an autumn leaf on the forest floor. But it is here, and not in the luminous options of the digital forum, that we sense something new: modest formats, oil paintings and restrained, colouristic mastery. In his painting, Bjarne Werner Sørensen is both retrospective and new. The beauty cannot be denied.

Erik Steffensen, Tandil, Argentina, 30th September 2017