Sense of a Landscape, Paintings by Carsten Segerlund Frederiksen, 6-23 march, 2025, Review

Firstly, congratulations to Carsten on this his first solo exhibition.  An artist’s first solo exhibition is often a nerve racking but necessary step on the road to personal and artist development. Without putting the work up in a public forum, it’s difficult to evaluate progress and make a determination on your next artistic move. As soon as the work is up on the wall you know pretty quickly which ones are successful and which ones need a rethink. So exhibiting your work, celebrating your work, becomes a necessary step in deciding where to go from here. 

Carsten is very used to exposure in the public arena through his published papers on climate science and climate change.  So this exhibition represents a move into new territory. In addition to his literary achievements this painting exhibition could be seen as a further manifestation of Carstens care for the environment and his efforts to remind us of its sustaining qualities and fragility through a warming planet.

The test of good painting is its ability to keep us coming back for more looks and to engender a sensory, felt response. The work has to communicate something, whether it’s just a feeling a narrative or both. I’ve witnessed Carstens artistic development over several years. His work is primarily read as internalized landscape and his inspiration comes from a concern for the natural world.

In examining the work, we identify several recurring themes, the landscape and its rhythms, strong colour shifts, and overdrawing to create rhythms and consolidate natural forms. Thankfully this work transcends any tonal gum tree influence. Rather, Carsten paints the feeling or the “sense” as he calls it, of the landscape and his emotional response to it. This is accomplished without actually painting rocks, grass or dirt. The poetic always trumps the literal.

Carstens calligraphic mark functions as a substitute for those literal elements amateur painters often fixate on. His mark making offers a substitute sensibility which distills the observed and remembered experience.

His subject is seen, noted and internally filtered, emerging as poetic expression rather than a photographic snapshot. Gestural glyphs reference the human figure and landscape features. An alternative grammar is created recalling observed or remembered objects.

 Carsten cites Bronze Age rock paintings found in Scandinavia as an influence on his work where human presence, animals and cultural artifacts are expressed as petroglyphs. By using these symbols, subject matter is condensed into visual metaphor and completes a translation into a semi abstract invented language. These distilled elements from the natural world read as graphic signs freeing the composition and its constituent elements from any obligation to copy trees and sky with stifling exactitude or labored realism.

The Sense of a landscape, 2023, Acrylic on Canvas, 90 cm x 120cnm

 In this painting for example, the glyphs can be interpreted as diminished human figures, only hinted at. Or perhaps an oblique reference to the damage human presence and overpopulation has wrought on the planet since the industrial revolution.

A MATTER OF TOUCH

Meaning in a work of art is to be found in a variety of ways. Meaning in Abstract art is more difficult to pin down, and may take the form of a palimpsest, recording an unfolding process conveyed through painted layers and representing earlier times and earlier iterations. Artists as practitioners read paintings a little differently, than say a casual observer, particularly where abstract or semi abstract art is concerned. A casual observer might wonder at the arrangement of shapes or colours, and may well ponder the ultimate meaning of the work. I think with abstract painting there is no ultimate meaning, and no definite finish. The meaning is open and often communicated through the artists touch with the brush, the choice of colour or the attrition of forms that have made it through to the final iteration.

As artists we want the work to communicate visual experience, mostly non-verbal, and prompt questions like what does this work make me feel, and where does my imagination go as I watch the painting unfold. In Carstens work, there’s a whole range of sensibilities at play, stored in each painting, speaking to us even before we identify what is actually depicted.  In looking at the work we understand something of his temperament, and his leaning toward strong, expressive colour. We see his interest in the landscape and his concern for the natural world. And finally we feel his musical sense of rhythm and movement activating so many of his paintings.

Richard Birmingham

2025