ALEXANDER RASMUSSEN:

NOTES ON A SUITE OF PAINTINGS 

Gary Michael Dault, January 2024

It was Alexander Rasmussen’s 2023 painting, Winter Wear, that galvanized me into wanting to look more closely at his work than I had before — and write something about it. 

Winter Wear, while a rather small (24” x 24”) painting, is so scrappy and self-assured, so visually authoritative, that it seems much larger than it really is. Rather strangely, the events, the visual incidents, of the work are constructed upon a strong, unapologetic field of mossy forest green. This use of green seems almost wickedly perverse, given that green is rarely regarded, in contemporary art, as a forceful colour, probably because of its hard-to-avoid associations, in most circles, with pastoral qualities; Rasmussen is clearly (gleefully, I expect) not deterred by any of that. 

Thrusting up from the bottom of the picture is a strangely mountainous form, snow-capped (that is to say, there is white paint on it) so that it evinces an oddly insistent Mount Fuji appearance — a no doubt extraneous literary reading which, though it may be irrelevant to the painting’s greater meaning, keeps suggesting in the work the presence of a kind of Asian atmosphere, something haiku-like, some Zen koanishness — some radically compressed richness you can’t crack open by mere inspection. This tantalizing sense of inscrutability comes to a head in the tipsy blue building-like structure which seems to contain a writhing of red, rune-like marks — a passage of inscription. 

But because none of Rasmussen’s cryptic “signals” or “messages” or “texts” can actually be cogently deciphered and decided upon in a literary way, the painting stubbornly maintains its enjoyable thing-ness, its objecthood, its refusal, in the end, to be anything other than what you see: a gathering of vividly coloured, quite muscular structures settled onto an uninfected ground. 

This is pure painting. 

It is instructive to compare it with a painting like Pterodactyl (also from 2023). Pterodactyl is not only larger than Winter Wear (at 42” x 42”) but is also considerably more detailed, more incidental, more anecdotal (in a painterly sense) and more decorated. Pterodactyl is also pure painting, in the sense that it furnishes a bountiful crop of moments of visuality, of pure optical intrigue, that only painting can supply. Look at that grey, spikey, vaguely animal-like form in the picture’s upper left quadrant.

Here is a heady congestion of pigment-bits, tiny brushed gestures, painted scraps and pigmented floor-sweepings that defy any normal pictorial exploration. There’s too much going on here to monitor, so we tend just to let those grey sections be whatever they want to be — without our participation. This is a kind of automatism, a venerable surrealist game that traditionally lent a work surprise, an unexpected texturing that left the viewer in a state of delighted resignation. There are moments in Pterodactyl, however, where Rasmussen appears to be in thrall to the Idea of the Decorative: the five creamy bars descending from the grey animal pincushion form, for example (why are they there and what do they contribute beyond mere painterly activity?), and the flesh-coloured hatchings that fence in that saucy yellow triangular entity at the upper right. I understand the brushy joy that fuels this kind of detailing, but it tends to exist in the painting for its own sake — like an afterthought — and, in my estimation, threatens to distract from the work’s overall impact. My own suspicion about this (I haven’t talked to Rasmussen about it) is that it is a procedural fallout from the young artist’s obvious admiration for the works of Harold Town (an admiration I share)—which, while usually brilliant and inventive, sometimes trapped the curmudgeonly old virtuoso in rococo moments that sometimes weighed him down. 

The Rasmussens I enjoy the most are the ones that knock you over with their rugged insouciance, their painterly cheek — and that, happily, includes most of his production. Rasmussen strikes me as a very deliberate painter, an artist who works very hard to coerce his paintings into the joie de vivre he clearly expects them to provide. I like the calligraphic Wheels, for example, for its rolling-thunder takeover of the canvas (with its gloriously mussy ground), and I like the exceedingly odd Don’t Look, an arrestingly strange work (the stranger the better, I say) with its entirely unpredictable blue reindeer-like protagonist with the wild yellow grips on its “horns.” And what are those fleshly truncated pipe-like things in the background? I really love not knowing. 

Similarly successful (for me, anyhow), are the tough-minded, rough-rider paintings like Team Colours, with its raw blue serrated edge across the bottom, Double Dip, which gnashes like a piranha, and the brilliant and exuberantly squalid Leftovers — to my mind, one of the very best of Rasmussen’s 2023 roundup — which has to bear the fate of being, as far as I can see, perfectly and satisfyingly designed. 

Also noteworthy are Rasmussen’s crowded Quest, with its (probably unconscious) riotous evoking of Harold Town’s splendid Great Seal paintings from the early 1960s (that small green oval is like a traffic light saying “go!”), his Emoji (though that grey rectangle seems a bit ill-at-ease) and the likeable Black Salt, which verges on becoming muddy but somehow avoids it. I also like Knuckleball, for its infectiously cheerful palette and for the rightness of that putty-coloured rectangle at the upper left, which actually appears to inhabit its staked-out territory in the painting with a touchingly persuasive sense of entitlement. 

One of the qualities I admire in Alexander Rasmussen’s paintings is the way they seem so movingly determined to succeed as paintings. They feel somehow engineered towards visual agitation and excitement; Rasmussen builds up his effects, as if he both knew what he wanted from them and how to get them. There is spontaneity here of course, but it’s a spontaneity carefully channeled, a spontaneity surging ahead within limits, a spontaneity destined for a careful if theatrical end. 

I sometimes feel that for Rasmussen, abstraction — or more accurately, the realm of non-representational painting — is like a rich, high-calorie piñata hanging in the air before him, and he is delighted to bash away at it with his big ambitious brush until the art-candy starts falling out of it. He’s probably not like that at all, but a vision is a vision.

The Paintings of Alexander Rasmussen 

and the Essential Dynamic Energy of Abstraction

By David Aurandt M.A.,M.F.A

The paintings of Alexander Rasmussen are unexpected, in the sense that his work arrives at a time following the zenith of postmodernism, a movement that hounded the exhausted tradition of modernism to near collapse. So you would think the vitality of such modern phenomena as “abstraction” would be depleted. But visual art, fortunately, is not subject to such illusions as “the idea of progress”, for example, as a forward movement of art and artists through time, one after another, continually improving as new ‘original’ works and artists succeed. Consequently, abstract paintings, ones that may but do not necessarily refer to anything outside of themselves, and artists employing forms, colours, and compositions that are not obvious on first glance, are all to be found in our post-postmodern art world. Abstraction carries on.

Long before Sandy was born, “abstract art” was declared dead and buried beneath the roiling waves of large perplexing theories derived from literary and philosophy academic studies and sardonic backward-looking practices that nurtured the promise of new directions in art and culture. But postmodern art may have arisen as early as Marcel Duchamp (“I am not opposed to the art of the past because it is art but because it is passed.”) and become realized in Andy Warhol (“Art is what you can get away with”). The intellectual and affective reflexes that motivated such artists as Kandinsky, Mondrian, de Kooning, Pollock and many other painters, eventually wore out. Seen from the long vantage of history, the last quarter of the 20th-century appeared convinced about the death of painting, enthusiastically proclaiming that American Abstract Expressionism, final monster of modern abstraction, was a ghost. But obituaries for abstraction were premature. 

“Abstraction” seems the best word, if we need one, to describe Sandy’s work and its main motivating strategy. Other words, like “non-objective” or “not-figurative” do not fit; there is no pretension that his work comes “ex nihilo”, from nothing, no idealistic aspiration that it must never be suggestive of things in the world, no false implication that reality is not the base. Clearly, experience most generally, and nature specifically, are his significant motivators. His paintings are one strong example of abstraction’s continuing vitality. His burgeoning strength lies partly in his invention of expressive means not dependent upon easily recognizable forms that will make for quick identifiable meaning. The freedom to work without preconception, without adherence to accepted conventions for the shape of meaning is what Sandy practices.

Those who are attracted to Sandy’s paintings will look more deeply and become engaged with them, exhilarated by their openness, reflexively searching for where they belong, to feel more comfortable responding to them, more at ease liking them. His viewers may also attempt the meaning of his paintings by employing some learned and habitual strategies of interpretation hoping to arrive at understanding or appreciation through form or colour, or even size. Continuing with such inquiry, those who stand before his paintings will discover, among other things that they do not easily give up their content. Viewers might attempt insight by asking where the artist comes from, in early life, in education, perhaps through an “artist statement”. The failure at obviousness in Sandy’s paintings is a consequence of certain exceptional qualities of genuine inspiration and motivation in him. And through experience, he rather quickly developed a belief that “school” would not be the place to practise his art nor to experience its growth into habit and calling. School was not to be his “necessary angel”, to borrow a phrase from poet Wallace Stevens. This conviction is uncommon but a marker of Sandy’s early intellectual and affective evolution.  

Sandy Rasmussen’s paintings are “abstract” in the original and authentic understanding of abstraction (drawn from). He does not give us facile resemblances of the phenomenal world we share; he does not employ clichéd channels and images, but rather he paints with a unique subjective vocabulary from an intuited response to his own experience. His are long-look paintings that we will gradually comprehend by letting go of customary thought and feeling. In this way he makes inventions, by which I mean that in his work we “come upon” the way that form can signify, not merely its literal meaning. It is his doing, and then ours, so when we “get the painting” we feel the excitement of discovery, his and our own.

David Aurandt was born in Connecticut and was educated there and in Massachusetts before taking permanent residence in Canada in 1965 and Canadian citizenship in 1971. In addition to full-time study at the New School of Art in Toronto he has a B.A. from Fairfield University in Connecticut, an M.A. from the University of Toronto, and an M.F.A. in painting from the Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies, Bard College, New York. During the past twenty five years he has taught at several universities including University of Prince Edward Island, Algoma University College-Laurentian University, Lakehead University, Brock University, and Trent University. He served as special advisor to the Art Gallery of Algoma in its early development, and was a consultant, programme planner, and curator for exhibitions for the Algoma Fall Festival. In 1983 he was appointed Director of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery where he curated several exhibitions of contemporary Canadian artists. Mr. Aurandt was a consultant for Eastman Kodak and was instrumental in establishing their new gallery at the Creative Imaging Centre in Camden, Maine. He is a curator and writer as well as a painter and printmaker whose work has been exhibited in a number of shows in Canada and the U.S., most recently at, Maine Coast Artists, Rockport, Maine; Maine/Maritime International at the University of Maine, Niagara Pumphouse Art Gallery, Niagara-on-the-Lake; Gallery of the School of Ideas in Visual Art, Niagara Falls. He was a founder and President of the Board of Theatre Algoma, a member of the Algoma University College Board of Trustees, a board member of Kaministikwia Theatre Laboratory as well as Monitor North Video Production in Thunder Bay, and a founding member of Artists North of Superior. For five years he was weekly film reviewer and commentator for CBQ-CBC Radio. In 1994 David Aurandt was appointed Director of Rodman Hall Arts Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario. He was a member of the Board of Niagara Vocal Ensemble and a member of the Brock University Dean’s Council for the Humanities. He is a founding member of Short Hills Art Gallery, and has served on the Vice-president’s Committee on Art at Niagara College, as well as on the City of St. Catharines Cultural Policy Committee. In January 2000 he was appointed Executive Director of The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. He is Past President of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, and a member of the Canadian Art Museum Director’s Organization.