THE GENUINE PAINTING                                                            Back

Morten Blyme and the picture


Painted work has often been heralded as a dying art. This, however, seems
to be a judgement made without any basis in reality. Take, for example,
the painter Morten Blyme, whose painting is exceptionally vigorous and
perceptive. He experiments, but he dos it from a classical point of
departure, which is reminiscent of the abstract expressionism we know from
the USA in the period after World War II.

His painting is abstract. Or more precisely: It falls in the crossroad
between the abstract and the figurative. The artist himself describes it
as a wish to break down the motive, in order to arrive at something new
and tangible, something of the pictures own nature. The genuine painting
is a painting which constitutes its own reality.

Substance is an important indicator in Morten Blyme`s work. His pictures
strike one precisely as intensive studies of the motive`s character and
its material extent. Or perhaps use the word: Consciousness. His paintings
resemble a process, which is temporarily blocked, and now stands and
vibrates on the edge change into something new and different. Seen in this
way the picture is both a mirror of consciousnesss, and a small piece of
consciousness in itself.

The artist often uses certain symbols and scribbles as a part of his
picture. This facilitates a structure and a focus in the picture, but it
is also his signature, which makes the pictures familiar and signals that
there is something we have in common. Every symbolic sentence is a kind of
story, a notice, a piece of information, which the picture both unmasks
and covers.

This duality is often found in Morten Blyme`s work. He has a goal in his
paintings and yet his essentially intuitive paintings are on the way to
other and greater things. They transcend a more general view of the world,
then one can initially perceive. It then demands both time and
concentration to explore his work.

The artist would simplify his works, but on the other hand, he knows this
is a demand which neither can nor must always be fulfilled. Tightness in
expression does not always give simplicity. His paintings are,
paradoxically, both simple and complicated. They are build up layer upon
layer, with fractures and space that cross each other in dynamic movement.

Morten Blyme desires strongly that his work be open for interpretation. A
picture must not close around itself. It may, however, contain inner
tensions, which the beholder can grasp and reflect further upon.

Movement inside of Morten Blyme`s pictorial world is a meeting with a
deeply personal painter, whose strong and real expression wins over much
of the insufferable lightness, which otherwise characterizes parts of
today`s art. It is consequent, brave and well done.


Ole Lindboe
Editor of the art magazine: Kunst. Author of a long series of books about
Danish artist.

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