Alex Jorgensen

Alex Jorgensen was born in 1967.  He studied at Bath Academy of Art and Brighton Polytechnic, where he was awarded the Birtles Memorial Prize. 

 

"Alex Jorgensen is the rarest of painters, whose quiet lyricism, whose abstracted view of things offers a sense of what it really means to look.  Earlier abstracts have some grounding in the best of post-war British non-figuration, Alex using the paint surface as a rich equivalence for the textures of the light, the natural geometries of earth and sky.  Not referential pictures, but distilling sensation, the world concentrated into the quietest arrangements of floating shape and colour.  Images of balances, of adjuncts and counterpoints, forms that meet, group and position like the components of a Morandi still-life.

 

The landscapes are just as modest in size, equally intense, equally meditative.  They reveal the same interest in rooms of temperate colour, field and moor bisected and demarcated by broad linearities of road and wall traversing the expanse.  With their gentle rusts, ochres, greys and dark greens under a flattening light, it is difficult to think of pictures that are more understated, yet at the same time more sensously made.  Again there is that Morandian interest in structure, but also in the depth and feeling of his material.  These are studies in the most muted hues, but still ones that have much to say about the seemingly 'empty' terrain to which Alex is drawn.

 

The best painters help us to see.  In Alex's case, there is always a sense of underlying design, of ordering, so his abstracts and landscapes are intertwined.  Just as he deals in the essence of paint, he deals with the fabric of place too, subjects coloured and shaped by the fall of the sky, a painter who gets to the weather of his location, and through a rare economy of means."

 

David Whiting