Orbit Motions
- new limbs on an ever-growing body
"Elements". Oil on linen, 45 x 60 cm. 2021.
The process of painting is a particular state of mind and body. A state of being very present. Central to the process is careful seeing and listening - equally careful reacting and expressing. It is an orbit between feeling and thinking, surrendering and deciding. Painting is also an outlet, an exposure. The inner nature is expressed in the outer, which means that the energy and biology of the painter is inevitably visible in the work. The artist and the artistic process are revealed in the paintings.
"Wave". Oil on linen, 45 x 60 cm. 2021.
At 45 x 60 cm, these works are smaller than usual. When you look at all six of them together, the spaces between the paintings form spaces for dialog, where the paintings give and take meaning to and from each other. Somehow this resembles the pause in the painting process when a work that is not quite finished rests. The painter leaves it for a while to listen, to know the next step-and then returns to the canvas, reacting, deciding, speaking through his choice of colors, shapes, brushstrokes.
"Ascend". Oil on linen, 45 x 60 cm. 2021.
The new, smaller format gives way to a new kind of monumentality. The relationship of the brushstrokes to the size of the canvas makes the artist's signs, his writing, seem larger. There seems to be a hint of hesitation in the painter's otherwise secure and familiar language in these new works. The choice of colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, form a palette of tones, a sound that is both warm and cold, vibrant. The shapes and lines of the works are round, elongated, thin, and they seem to be in motion, they are on the move, dancing in front of the depths that the backgrounds create.
"Interlude". Oil on linen, 45 x 60 cm. 2021.
It feels like we are inside huge cavities, bodies, caves, wombs, or in outer space. It feels safe, somehow familiar, and at the same time strange, abstract, open. In some of the works, like 'Elements', the calligraphy or shapes moving in these spaces seem very close to us, as if we are surrounded by them, immersed in their world of movement, while in other works, like 'Interlude', they are further away from us, out of reach. In all of the works, there seems to be more than what can be seen within the frame; the paintings are like windows into infinite spaces.
"Nocturne". Oil on linen, 45 x 60 cm. 2021.
In 'Nocturne', the background is a variety of colors; dark gray and red, blue, green, a little white. The calligraphy is in burnt orange. As in the other works, the brush strokes and the encounters between the colors are visible. This emphasizes the concrete process of painting and makes the perception of the works move from pure tactile sensations, focusing on the materiality of the paintings, to associative readings of the works and back again.
The works are pieces of an ever-growing body of work in the making. They are not isolated. They are organic geometries that grow from within the painter and outward, forming a body with more and more limbs, increasing the organic geometry that is the artist's entire oeuvre.
"Way". Oil on linen, 45 x 60 cm. 2021.
These works from 2020 are full of rhythm and, as always in Bjarne Werner's work, we are not very far from music, because of the intimate relationship between non-figurative painting and a non-verbal expression that also exists in music. The painter, who lives and works in Copenhagen, is on a journey that takes us from the wordless, abstract state of mind, which involves a careful attention to bodily sensations, to the concrete, physical reality of the materials of the paintings, and back again. The materials, the paint, the canvas, the brushes, the texture, the colors, are all central to the work. It is an ongoing exploration and conversation about the potential of painting as a medium and the possible languages of the painter.
We recognize our own corporeality in the paintings. But they still have a kind of strangeness. Maybe it is because they cannot be grasped only with the use of logical sense. They speak to a bodily or tacit knowledge in us, as most art, and especially abstract art, does. Much like the artist in the process of painting, we as viewers must alternate between listening and reacting, feeling and thinking, in our encounter with the works in 'Orbit Motions'.
Text by Helene Johanne Christensen