Something has Happened
August Sörenson creates sculptures in the kiln. He does not chisel in stone, carve in wood or cast in bronze. Instead, he does what ceramicists have done throughout the ages: he shapes clay, applies a glaze and subjects it to fire.
The difference, however, is that August Sörenson crosses the boundary into the field of fine arts, and utilizes the energy and the element of surprise that incites the underdog to exclaim: “Look, its possible!” That which distinguishes the fine arts is that it is wonderfully non-practical, but has an amazing capacity to raise questions, heighten the vitality of life, and challenge the intellect. It urges us to think beyond our habitual patterns – to start philosophizing.
The clay is also conceptually important to August Sörenson with its links to nature, cycles and feedback. The baked clay is paradoxically fragile but at the same time more durable than wood, bronze or iron, and in the presence of the ancient works from all corners of the earth, we come into contact with bygone worlds. There exists a resonant absence in the archaic, with works that over time have become liberated from their senders, but that bear witness that something has happened. Someone has lived. An individual holding a radically different, enigmatic view of the world.
Artistically, August Sörenson sees himself as relating to a pre-contrapposto era, before the step was taken to simulate nature over two thousand years ago. Seen from this perspective, his works are enigmatic, statuary symbols, reticent but full of energies that are generated both by that which they appear to convey, and by what they actively hide. This aspect feeds back to the origin of ceramics in the form of the vessel with its concealed inner space and its delimiting exterior – with its microcosm.
Art is born of art, and in August Sörenson’s works one can clearly see links to Joan Miró, who created his own world, parallel to our own, but where anything could happen; to Dick Bengtsson, who short-circuited the viewer’s intellect by combining radically contrasting languages; and to Öyvind Fahlström, one of the brilliant geniuses of Swedish art, who spoke of bisociation vis-à-vis association: if one were, for example, to combine a piece of A and a piece of B and the resulting charge would be explainable, that would constitute an association, but if, on the other hand, the intense charge is completely inexplicable, then we would be dealing with a bisociation that pertains directly to the power of art and poetry. August Sörenson’s works are rich in bisociations.
His works also bear a strong kinship to the explosive creativity in the ’90s within the Swedish comics scene, with names such as Lars Sjunnesson, Max Andersson and the greatest of them all, Joakim Pirinen. Not too long ago, comics were considered inferior, if not directly harmful, and here it is clear that this underdog perspective also energizes the art of August Sörenson. Just as in the above-mentioned comics, Sörenson’s figures are also subjected to desperation as well as dramatic and violent events. Darkness and hysteria are never far off.
Besides being imbued by the absurdism that runs as a red thread through modernism, there is also a wonderful sense of humour to everything August Sörenson does. This hopelessly misunderstood, subversive and forgiving power, that has little to do with the guffaw and more to do with an attitude on life. One that offers space to experience how unfathomably rich and enigmatic humankind and reality truly are.
Björn Springfeldt
Former director of the
Translation: Richard Griffith Carlsson