A. JORGENSEN

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about the idea of ‘inscape’, an artistic process that does much to define what Alex Jorgensen paints. This is not to say that he is an overtly expressive painter. He is far too self-contained and understated for that (and I cannot think of an artist who would find the idea of self-expression more tricky. His work is much more about expressiveness). Here instead is the least coercive ordering of things, a gentle sorting process, a way in which he is continually re-focussing on lines of horizon, on centres, borders, meetings and configurations of form and colour; assimilating, filtering, condensing. This is a landscape of considerable economy, a hard-achieved process, where visual perception and internal thoughts are reworked and remade into distilled constructive sequences, sort of assemblages in paint.

Part of the attraction of these pictures is their tentation, a sense of a gradual and concentrated homing in, meditatively readjusting and re-fixing points of vision, points of contact, lines of demarkation. Quiet relationships and contrasts. He paints with a controlled freedom, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. The pictures are acts of gestation with a restraint which is rare in current practice; a tremulous hesitancy where edges and divisions are chalky and roughed out, a sensitive bleeding of one pigment into another, where the deliberations of the artist’s hand are seen in quietly varied strokes and build-ups of paint. 

Areas of temperate colour are as much about subtle and soft intermixtures. There is an avoidance of rigidity or slickness; instead we sense that good painting can be a matter of approximation, of somehow finding one’s way through to a kind of clarity - or a least working towards it.