Rasmus Styrmer: OBSIDIAN

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“Everything is from sincere interest.
If it is to dissect an 18th-century painting or my relationship to dementia, it is sincere interest that
makes me paint.
I want to grasp something, acquire knowledge, gather elements that don’t necessarily have a clear
direction.
I’m in love with the formal decision, but my painterly practice is simultaneously driven by
expressivity.
Everything that I see points at something, that points at something, that points back where I started.
If it is the third or the twelfth, it is all connected in an ambivalent web where everything is both
clear, unclear or faint.
I work in pairs, series, or as my dear friend describes it, inverses. Some of the verses form rimes
while others form stories, some tells of fiction and abstraction while others are recitations of crude
reality. The verses can be presented on their own or gathered in a volume.
The exhibition consists of fascination with darkness, the absence of light and how these can create
tremendous depth and extraordinary space, in the same stroke I could mention the interest of gloss
and reflection that comes from the careful placing of brush stroke after brush stroke in thin oiled
layers.

Observing and beholding the gloss leads me to look at different materials, information about some
of these is acquirable by painting a piece of fabric, others I get by working with the process, engaging
with the materials, challenging it on its temporality, or by presenting it adding only a few
complimentary decisions.
I am not able to fully tell what I do or where I want it to go, for that I can’t even begin to understand,
I can only wave my arms around until I grab hold of something I can sense and then hope that it will
bring me closer to that which is on the tip of my tongue, bring me closer to something I don’t
comprehend.”

Kilde: Galleri Jacob Bjørn