"Old fashioned" was one of the words in an other-wise positive review of Jan Sivertsen's latest exhibition at the Calerie Asbaek in Copenhagen in 1997.

However "old fashioned" (preceded by a "who?" and followed by an "it won't do, away with it!" is exactly what this relentless, categorical assertion from a representative of the up and coming generation of Danish art critics, is. This generation of art critics, in the middle of a period where video and installation works dominate, are going to have to take into account the distressing fact that a great number of the students at The Royal Danish Academy of Art, are fighting to abolish the prohibition of paintings and to end the current state of art schools as painting-free zones.

But "old fashioned" was not a word which troubled the artist when we met over a glass of wine at a Venetian bar during the almost painting-free 47th. biennial. Perhaps it was the wine Jan Sivertsen savoured or perhaps it was the word but in any case it wasn't distasteful. Of course not. For in the word "old fashioned" lies an acknowledgement of tradition and the admission that every painter stands on the shoulders of his predecessors just as it suggests a submission to the belief in the importance of colour; that it is meaningful to put layer upon layer of colour on the canvas. That this form of fine art has virtues, possesses new ways of thinking, removes boundaries, changes one's field of understanding, has great beauty and is relevant.

Of course, of course it is like that. It may seem strange that one has to start off by saying that painting has value. That painting is something very special. That painting can do something which nothing else in the world can. Perhaps it has become necessary to notice it because the world consists of such a terrible amount of bad paintings. Rushed off paintings, sloppy paintings, paintings without substance, paintings that are postulates, paintings which simply follow a convention (which is very diffe

rent from joining with tradition and working with it, entering a dialogue with it, feeding one's own era through it, adding to the evolution of art). Paintings that are created simply because someone wishes to say they have painted them (in most cases for some incomprehensible reason). Paintings that are pure decoration. Paintings that are simply bad paintings. Paintings that fill up the world. Paintings that are nothing. And paintings that are worse than nothing. But as Bjørn Nørgaard has pointed out: "If 90% of everything in our time is of bad quality, then 90% of art is probably bad as well".

All that introductory sparring just to say that I don't believe that Jan Sivertsen's paintings are of bad quality. I was certainly taken back a little when he asked me if I could write a text about his pictures because he once pointed out that I had misunderstood him in a description of his work. This was in my book on Per Hebsgaard, "Nar glas og kunst mødes", (Copenhagen, 1994) where I hinted that Jan Sivertsen's works seem to have a French tonality, that his pain-tings are French in their tone and selfperception, contrary to the Nordic tone we are so used to in our melancholy latitudes. Maybe this description employed associations which suggested terms like elegance, lyrical abstraction or even decorative qualities.

So, in 1997: No, Jan Sivertsen's work is not a harmonised part of the French, lyric, abstract tradition. But neither is it typically Nordic. What is it then? It is faithful to itself, it's own history, it's own creation. Towards Jan Sivertsen's development and experience. To his mind.

Jan Sivertsen's painting is ... painting. Painting is painting is painting. That this doesn't represent anything is obvious. The kind of paintings Jan Sivertsen paints are about themselves. They are themselves. They have a language and an existence of their own. Detached from the world but, of course, not independent of it. We are not talking about academic exercises. Sure, it doesn't represent anything, sure, it doesn't tell us anything in an epic way. But it is a part of the world. Jan Sivertsen's world. His painting articulates a condition, it speaks about the world in our time. But it does it in a fragmentary fashion, without insisting on greater connections, structured stories, logical courses of development, ideological constructions or banal meanings. It is its own. It possesses its

own logic and this logic is far from the ordinary linear or sequential way of looking at things.

This kind of painting has something to do with colour. What colours can do to each other. How a composition hangs together. It doesn't 'deal' with anything. There is no narration. Not even in the detached sculptural works such as "The Painters Wall" in which he makes use of small, plastic, toy soldiers. This merely has the intention of creating opposition, obstacles and doubt.

But if the narrative is thrown out (or at least left to the individual's own discretion, and Jan Sivertsen has also hinted that the eye itself must find its own message) it doesn't mean that figuration isn't there. As a principal compositional element. It can be in the pictures' partly blurred geometrical forms like the all-encompassing circle or the underlying crucifix. Hints of the different geometry of the sexes. Formerly a kind of controlled ornamentation, certain patterns and movements over the canvas, pictures which seem to take as a starting point a fascination with cults and paganism, mysticism and shamanism. Though nature is not a direct source of inspiration one cannot dismiss from the paintings themselves, a sense of nature, just as some paintings seem to reveal an engagement with architectural fragments; this especially is seen in Jan Sivertsen's various public works and the functional structures he often chooses when undertaking this kind of work.

And it can be in the diffuse human shapes, which are just about to step out onto the picture's surface. But who are, nevertheless, kept under control by the rivers of colour. They are there but they never really manifest themselves. They serve a purpose without being the significance of the picture. They resemble figures but they are not, because they are colours and the wonderful thing with a painting can be that the use of colour in an area or the creation of a movement or a form demands the existence of other colours, movements, rhythms and forms if the composition is to succeed and the picture hang together.

Jan Sivertsen's painting is fertile. One can also say that it is generous or aggressive. Although Jan Sivertsen being a true colorist with a fine sense of balance is capable of keeping his paintings in check with cool colour tones so that they won't tip over, one can also say that they are warm. The colours are warm, the tonality is

warm. Without any difficulty one can go so far as to say that his painting is sensuous. It is pleasurable. It deals with the painter's materials. How one uses them. How one treats them: stretching, pulling, building up. So, it is about old fashioned painting virtues in the sense of understanding how a picture is built up and a knowledge of what colours can and will do in clarified co-existence.

Jan Sivertsen was born in 1951 in Copenhagen. He lives and works in Paris and is doing fine. That he is doing fine one can see from his paintings. They are honest. They are paintings that he can stand by. They are pictures without any academic pretensions.

Jan Sivertsen was educated from 1977-82 at The Royal Danish Academy of Art by Sven DaIsgaard, Albert Mertz, Knud Nielsen and Robert Jacobsen. The last mentioned sent him to Paris for further education by Dewasne with, what Jan Sivertsen, believed was a recommendation. But there was no recommendation, not even so much as a telephone call from one old friend to another. However, he succeeded. Jan Sivertsen studied at l'[cole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs.

It may seem reasonable to try to point to a relationship with his Danish academy companions, who in the first half of the eighties experimented with the so-called 'wild painting' and its engagement with aggressive colours and 'simple sign' compositions, but Jan Sivertsen is heading somewhere else, his painting is essentially different. Because, again, it is painting which is not realized as an artistic strategy, or as a disguise for concept-art, but it is painting in the classical and "oldfashioned" sense of the term, where "oldfashioned" can be replaced by "genuine" or "sterling."

Jan Sivertsen's paintings are about colour. They are about their own formation. From a traditional point of view they are free of objects and representations but absolutely physical; as suggested they are sensuous, carried by figurative elements and a remembrance of themselves and of the painter's mind that they are reflecting. Filtering the world, gathering it, becoming a world on it's own terms. Difficult to shake off.