Raucci / Santamaria

Glenn Sorensen

11 Mar - 29 Apr 2011

Exhibition view
GLENN SORENSEN
Geranium Empire
11 March - 29 April, 2011

The work of Glenn Sorensen (Sydney 1968, lives and works in Sweden) reflects in its style the uncontaminated suspension of the Nordic atmospheres and the arcane and mysterious appeal of the Australian territory. The combination of these two components is expressed by evanescent landscapes and isolated details of the natural world, sketched with a range of light shades, often in contrast with plain black backgrounds. An evocative and metaphysical painting, tending to recreate a timeless climate of expectation, fruit of a scrupulous technique suggesting an intimist and introspective approach. Images built slowly, by colour stratifying, with formal coherence and visual elegance.
For his fourth exhibition in the Raucci/Santamaria Gallery, the artist presents a number of ceramics and new paintings of small size. The main subject of Sorensen's works is the geranium: this plant, silent and constant presence of the domestic life is painted from real, portrayed with attention in every detail that distinguishes one leaf from another. The intersected branches, the distinctive hairy foliage, heart-shaped or jagged and the different tones of green are conveyed with detailed realism but simultaneously seem isolated from time through the use of a black background. Still life exalting the uniqueness of every form of life and the perceivable variety even in the actual species.
An intimate bi-dimensional depiction that finds its plasticity in the ceramics, obtained stratifying the moulds of the geranium leaves that adorn the artist's studio. Moulds that, painted in black, varnished and stacked, take harmonious shapes. The cast of a snake, obtained from a number of reptiles from North Carolina in the United States, surrounds each sculpture creating a bio-zoomorphic hybrid. The figure of the snake, far from the negative biblical sense, enriches the sinuous spiral movement that characterizes the ceramics. A technique dating back to the XVI century, inspired by the work of the french ceramist and alchemist Bernard Palissy, the first to use plants and animals as fossil models.
Nature is petrified in all its multiform authenticity, closed in an obscurely beautiful microcosm.
 

Tags: Glenn Sorensen