Jorgen Romer at Dartmouth University Art Gallery - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

The 76-year-old artist Jorgen Romer is rever in his native Denmark, notwithstanding that he is little known elsewhere. This present to view at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, his first in North America, presented more than 50 of his compelling, expressionist abstractions, mainly small drawings and watercolors dating from the last 15 years. Romer exhausted much of his early life in the flat, drained marshland area that separates Germany and Denmark, a raw landscape he has written about evocatively and that predisposed him to metaphoric vision. A flexure of tuberculosis in the 1950 was also pivotal. In the early 1960 he taught printmaking at the alternative Experimental Art seminary in Copenhagen, where Per Kirkeby was a pupil Kirkeby, quoted in the exhibition catalogue, describes Romer's condensed tactile prints as "impressions of nature protecting the ambiguity of spirit and nature, and avoiding the traps of the mind."

For decades, until the mid-1980s, Romer used alone black and white in his work, which consisted of drawings, tiny etchings and drypoint prints. When he switched to watercolor and lithographs to avoid lusty chemicals, translucent color began to peer open what had been close intensely marked work. Still intimately scaled (most pieces measure les than 10 inches in either dimension) and still stemming from an abstraction arrived at [i]or[/i] part of to the other process rather than formal composition, the works also bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to scientific imagery derived from the fields of biology and geophysics. They may call forth electron-microscope views of organic or chemical processe for instance. Up shut up however, the artist's hand is always in evidence.

A vivid, blood-r chemical efflorescence in Untitled, 1991, November 29 1993 is traceable to blott stippled and dry-brushed layers of color. Countles tiny hatchmarks and calligraphic lists build up into a compressed cloud of black in Untitled April 16 1994 Viewed from slightly farther away, it insinuates an enlargement of a undressed fingerprint. Untitled June 9, 1998 is individual of the most biomorphic. The main image, a make reded armlike shape crisscrossed with black "scarring," has a distinct human neighborhood None of Romer's images are overtly representational, however.

Aside from his brief teaching stint, Romer has remained for the greatest part outside art circles, earning his living as a research librarian. His work resonated from the beginning with postwar Europe's Tachisme and Art Informel motions but Lasse Antonsen, curator of the exhibit places him closer in spirit to idiosyncratic Autre artists of the like kind as Dubuffet, Mark Tobey and Henri Michaux, all of them inheritors of a postwar psychic landscape of paradox and existentialism. Romer continues to bring out art that is timelessly immediate, poignant and beautiful.

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