Vie des Arts #192 Autumn 2003
John K. Grande
Sherbrooke
David Sorensen; Suite de l'Estrie
Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke
June 14th to September 14th
Web: http://mba.ville.sherbrooke.qc.ca

David Sorensen's new suite of paintings follow on from the Grid series and the more recent Havana and Pre-Columbian series.  The previous tensions that existed between abstract colour field  preoccupations with light and surface and the more objective figurative or representational aspect of David Sorensen's painting now seem to be resolving themselves. With the present show titled Suite de l'Estrie it is as though the clouds have parted to reveal sunlight and colour no doubt due to the less sombre Mexican environment Sorensen spends part of each year in. The large scale paintings from a recent winter sojourn in Mexico come to grips with the expressive and more rational tendencies that coalesce in Sorensen's art. The grid patternings still predominate and could represent some kind of order or rationale independent of nature... Is it the human condition? These paintings resonate with colour that is layered. Somehow Sorensen organizes form with colour.

On the surfaces of these painterly paintings the chaotic dance of life reigns supreme. And Sorensen is not afraid to work in a very large scale. He adapts his painterly vision to a rational preoccupation (containing life perception in a rectangular format). There is an eloquence and evident joy rare in contemporary Quebec painting here. We see the surface movement, the geste combining with Sorensen's grid motifs in Luminous Blue (2003) and Torrent (2003). The borders are various tones and there is a surface flutter of brushwork. These are colour field abstractions, every bit as expressive in the light they bring with them as Mark Rothko's tonal paintings. The small Array paintings are like miniature Rothkoðs but more textural and tangible. You almost feel like carrying one home with you!!

 
Esquina Amarilla (2003) shows Sorensen playing on grid with grid. The micro-macro interplay with scale and dimension is a lot of fun visually. Your eye moves back and forth, literally skates the surface of this ice. Even the whole canvas becomes a virtual grid section... a smaller grid hovers building its own layer above the main grid that cover most of the canvas. This illusion is sensual, tactile and blissful.
Cosmo is more intricate with its density of dark surface blues and mauves that blend in a curious depth-surface illusion. The mystical colours call to mind Frederick Varley but he was a figurative landscape and portrait painter... Sorensen resolves to bring conflicting stylistic ideations together -the rational colour field and the visceral chance action of surface brushwork. Perhaps William Butler Yeats expressed the dichotomy between these two very different worlds the best:

   Those terrible implacable straight lines
   Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream  
   (from The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid)

Sorensen is still up to the challenge and his art still surprises us visually... a sign there is light at the end of the tunnel, and when light combines with colour it's as abstract as reality itself.

John K. Grande

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