Profile
The poetic drama and the forever changing Wadden Sea
By Tom Jørgensen, Kunstavisen
Lars Bollerslev’s paintings come across with the same physical presence and knottiness as the soil he depicts. The Shepherd’s Hut and the surrounding heavy, wet fields and meadows are shown together with a great, all-encompassing horizon in sun, rain, sleet and gale, and under the impressions and effects of all four seasons. These are paintings that get under the skin of the viewer.
The pictures are simultaneously vibrant and monumental. The colours glow and smoulder, or they condense into a black-grey Nordic melancholy.
Often the paintings take on a nearly abstract characteristic. We recognise the cubic house, but the background is reduced and simplified as horizontal colour layers with glowing textures, which could perhaps remind you of a Mark Rothko. Here the paintings take on a dimension which is at once vibrant and monumental. The colours glow and smoulder, or they condense into a black-grey Nordic melancholy.
An interpretation is not really needed. The paintings stand as a testimony of a piece of nature and a solid reality experienced through the soul of an artist. Unsentimental, sobering and naked, though this does not stop the viewer from experiencing a great deal of emotions when looking at them. Because isn’t that what Lars Bollerslev does - makes us open our eyes to the beauty in our surroundings, whether it be the marshlands of Jutland, a classical pavilion in Ribe or the ancient buildings of Italy?
UNDER A BLACK SUN
Lone Schloo Erhardsen, MA. in Art History
Serial exploration of a single subject can seem like a manic preoccupation, but as is the case with the Field Supervisor´s House, it can also open for the existential aspects of life.
The nature of the Wadden Sea is stability and changeability in one and the same breath; it is the highest and most highly charged of sunny skies against a cloak of grey, impenetrable sky with no trace of inner tensions.
In Bollerslev´s never-ending work of catching something essential and acute with his brush, one picture of the Field Supervisor´s House emerges after the next – a constant stream of repeats which are never a copy, but an answer to seasons, weather, mind and the tender observations of day and night.
The house has become a Heimat icon for the Tønder Marshes. Bollerslev is a local son and artist. The Field Supervisor´s House near Ballum is in the neighbourhood and is caught on the road from Hjerpsted, on a bi-cycle, across the edge of the dyke, as a distant creature of dusk in the flat marshes. It has been said of Bollerslev´s paintings that they are borne by, or even born of, the rich dark clay which forms the subsoil in this region.
The paintings start with a small seven-minute sketches made on site, later to emerge in the studio, dug up with the spatula and in layers of impasto and glaze pulled out of the range and across the canvas. Here are dark skies with a streak of light on the horizon. It is breezy out there, and the night, the winter and the rain give a huddling shake. That´s how it is here in the marshes.
