Beyond Words

 

Morten Lassen’s painting practice is an endless search for compositional harmony—the push and pull of line and colour, structure versus dissipation. Layers of paint and line inform the final composition and have been that way throughout his career. Indeed, Lassen doesn’t delineate between individual works, rather he sees the act of painting as a continuing journey into the nature of intuition. Each canvas, a stanza in a lifetime of imaging abstract integrated thoughts and influence.

For the expressive painter, there is a constant risk of the destruction of work in the pursuit of excellence. Lassen is reconciled to the risks. He pushes the process of making paintings, surrounded by months of work that are habitually sacrificed on the altar of aesthetic perfection. The paintings that survive the arduous process have a rare vitality—the urgency of the mark-making, the layers, and the glazes of paint coalesce into satisfyingly complete paintings. 

Morten Lassen’s studio is based in Kronborg Castle, Denmark. Outside of his influence in Australia, he is an artist with a strong international presence. His inclusion in the Venice Biennale’s Personal Structures in 2017, alongside his presence in art fairs across London, Miami, Seattle, Jakarta, Stockholm, Toronto, New York and Singapore is a testament to this.

 

Ralph Hobbs
February, 2023