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.