Many years of experimentation lay behind the art of Jørgen Rømer before it manifested itself in 1959. Shortly thereafter, his small drawings and etchings became known and he quietly, and undisputedly, took up his place within the Danish art scene as one of its foremost practitioners. But he is a unique individual. His is a rare guest performance that neither points directly toward the future nor, for that matter, appears to stem directly from the past. His art was timeless from the beginning; its means of expression carries within it time itself as an extension of matter. It is also the carrier of a lyrical sadness, often reflecting the destruction, decomposing and transformation of nature's hidden forces and the accompanying doubts of the mind.
The suffering many of these images lead into is both terrifying and challenging, and perhaps also, depending on the observer, life-affirming. It is in this sense the Rømer manifest a rare inward search that makes him one of the finest examples of the "autre" artists who came on the scene in the aftermath of World War II - artists manifesting what the French art critic Michel Tapie early in the 1950's describes as an art of contrast, which through paradox manifests the unseen within the visible. The artists who caused Michel Tapié to reflect on this fundamentally new aesthetic on the postwar years - artists such as Wols, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Tobey and Henri Michaux - were, like Jørgen Rømer, solitary figures and do not really form a movement. What Michel Tapié found in these artists' work was the promise of a new ambiguity, a new transcendence.
The "autre" artists are less related in style than in intent, and their art is often placed under such categories as "informel" or "tachisme." It is as if the real challenge in this period was in relation to "the soul of matter." The Danish artist Asger Jorn, who was closely associated with both Dubuffet and Michaux, wrote in 1952, "Objective science is the study of how matter thinks, of the spirit of matter. Subjective science could be called the science of how matter feels, of the interests of matter, or the soul of matter, its enthusiasm or eros, its incarnating principle." It was a new, demanding irrationality which made itself available. It was the soul searching its form in the surface of matter, or, as Jørgen Rømer writes in his 1962 prose text, "The Flatlands," "A vertical surface toward eternity."
It is regrettable that Rømer has not written more poetic reflections like "The Flatlands," which was published in the magazine Hvedekorn. It may be that as this short piece so perfectly wove together all the themes one finds in his art that there was no further need for literary reflection. As in Rømer drawings and prints, a basic mood embraces a Rømer drawing and prints, a basic mood embraces a series of images that, upon reflection, turn out to be far more complex and conflicting than first assumed. Concrete reference turn out to be much less concrete than at first glance and furthermore imbued with a symbolic value that does not allow itself to be trapped within an encompassing network of references, and which also leaves out any real allegorical framework. The piece is both a sensing and a reflection and carries an almost sarcastic attitude toward human actions and rituals - and nature's insensitive actions. Man as a fool in a nature which has its own purposes, and which through suffering gives the meat its juice and plants their nectar.
The Flatlands is autobiographical in the sense that Rømer grew up in the marshes of Sønderjylland in the disputed border area between Germany and Denmark, and in his youth had his first significant aesthetic experiences there. As one learns that Rømer suffered from tuberculosis in the 1950's, it becomes difficult not to read the text as a metaphor connecting geography and biology, marshes and lungs. That the text expresses the contemporary, almost mystical, attitude toward the relationship between matter and spirit found other places within European art, is one of the strange occurrences that defies analysis. We look at it afterwards as confirmation of the presence of a larger cultural expression that inexplicably manifests itself through individual artists more or less simultaneously - often in different countries - and furthermore makes it possible for these individual artists to express their own specific sensibility. As an artist, one cannot choose to be in the presence of such a challenge. Geography and history set the stage.
The psychical landscape in which the "autre" artists' found themselves was marked by the terrors of the Second World War. The artist became an anonymous fugitive, a traveler in texts and the graffiti on city walls. A homeless seeker, scratching his tracks into a landscape that has become unknown.
Jørgen Rømer was thirty-seven years old when he began to show his work in 1960. In the years before, his need to express himself was clearly present, but he did not yet possess a language, Rømer studied art history in the 1840's and 50's - specializing in architectural history - and worked, even after receiving his degree, as a research librarian at the Art Academy in Copenhagen, a position he held until his retirement. In many ways it could not have been otherwise. Although Rømer has held a lifelong fellowship from the Danish equivalent to the National Endowment for the Arts since 1980, and has received many other recognitions, he is not an artist who has the need for, or whose art would necessarily have benefited from, being a "full time" artist. His art has its own demands. His work is not necessarily the result of long hours spent in the studio, but rather the result of the layering of experiences and perceptions that later - one is tempted to say in the late evening hours - manifest themselves.
Significantly though, it was at the Art Academy that Jørgen Rømer found his voice. Though not a matriculating student, he began, in 1957, to frequent the School of Graphic Arts at night, where Holger J. Jensen - who had run the studios since 1955 - began to teach him. At this time it is also significant that Rømer became friends with the artist Richard Winther and that they together explored the techniques and challenges of dry point, aquatint and etching.
It is printmaking that makes Jørgen Rømer unique expressiveness possible. The resistance of the material, its ability to manifest its own will and to demand a submission to chance, as well as the occurrence of unpredictable chemical effects, must almost immediately have made possible Rømer characteristic, irresolute line in interplay with the dissolve shadow and ambiguous form. In printmaking Rømer found the resistance in the material he had been looking for. The open process, the constant mark-making, erasure and rewriting, was the language he had always known existed.
When the Experimental Art School opened in Copenhagen in the fall of 1961, Jørgen Rømer and Richard Winther had a decisive, but short, influence on a generation of younger artists, among them Per Kirkeby. The school was regarded by many as an alternative to the Academy, and especially printmaking - which was taught by Rømer and Winther - held great interest.
The early 1960's was marked by the "breakthrough of matter" as Per Kirkeby has called it. The beginnings of a period of border dissolving, which Rømer, more than any other, represented - along with, for a short period, Poul Gernes, the artist who later emerged as the primary force behind the school. Like Rømer, Gernes also explored the tactile qualities of printmaking but with methods influenced by the work of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. Per Kirkeby wrote in 1979: "Rømer and Gernes made impressions of nature. Each in their own way." He writes perceptively on what is the true message in their art, mentioning among other things the necessity of "protecting the ambiguity of spirit and nature, and avoiding the traps of the mind."
Poul Gernes, as well as Per Kirkeby and others of his generation, soon looked toward new influences; and by the end of 1962, Rømer and Winther rarely participated in the activities of the school. In 1962, before being influenced by structuralism and semiotics, Umberto Eco quite rightly defined the late 1950's and early 60's as characterized by the "open work" - by an art that refuses to remain finished, but instead gains its true form in its process or performance, in a situation in which the artist creates a framework and lets the viewer or spectator have a decisive role. What Eco saw happening was the creation of a much expanded field for the arts and the possibility of another consciousness. There were new demands on the spectator, and these demands were also present in Rømer's work, although on a more intimate and contemplative level. The work has not been finished, it has only sought a certain form, a certain presence and awaits its reading, its renewal, its transformation. As Rømer has expressed it: "One never finishes an image. It really doesn't matter whether one is working on five or a hundred images. In reality, one only works on a few images throughout one's life."
These trends in the early 1960's, this search for the artwork's true existence through its performance, let the Experimental Art School seamlessly from collage and assemblage into a world incorporating Fluxus, Happening, Pop Art and other Neo-Dada manifestations. The school, which by 1963 had turned into an art collaborative, also became more and more involved in politics as the 1960's led into 1968. But before that happened, several of its members, among them Henning Christiansen and Bjørn Nørgård, began a close collaboration with the German artist Joseph Beuys who, after his first early performances within a Fluxus context, now found greater appreciation for his work and actions among these younger artists - a collaboration which in the case of the composer Henning Christiansen continued until Beuys' death in 1986.
Jørgen Rømer did not participate in these events but had earlier chosen to return to the demands of his own work. Beuys did play a certain role, however. At this time Rømer became aware of Beuys' drawings from the late 1940's and the 50's and found that they confirmed much of what he represented. This was furthermore strengthened when Rømer visited the van Grinten brothers - the boyhood friends and long-time supporters of Beuys' work - in 1971, and spent an evening looking at Beuys' early shamanic and occult drawings, drawings that map out his mental fragmentation after the war and his search for a new spiritual ground. It wasn't necessarily important to Rømer what the drawings depicted or referred to. More important was the "writing" and the search expressed - that they, as in his own drawings, depict an event and a state of mind where the final result is as much a drawing as witness and concrete object.
One can't really decipher motifs in Jørgen Rømer art. They are there, one gets a glimpse of them - the chest cavity, the sheep's skull, the male and female sex organs, the landscape, and the fine strings a decomposing piece of fruit or a potato draw in the dark. But the reality of the image resides in the mind, in the multiple and conflicting readings.
In the early work there is a persistent search into the darkness of the print medium, a search which is most often aided by the drypoint technique with its double line, both fine and smeared. But drypoint is also aggressive, scratched into a surface that is left wounded, almost violated. This scratched, double line, which exposes and defines darkness, was also present in Kandinsky's work in the period around 1913-16 when he attempted to reach abstraction through drawing and printmaking. Kandinsky sought a vocabulary of forms combined with gestural writing, which would be the carrier of a new metaphysics. Emotions and a new state of mind would be present, but only indirectly refer to narrative elements and the outer appearance of objects.
We find the same both aggressive and gentle line in the German artist Wols'work shortly after World War II. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre - who supported Wols both morally and financially after he returned to Paris from the internment camps - wrote after Wols' death about his art: "There can be no composing: the vision will be made visible of itself, since seeing and making seen are one and the same." Sartre realized how Wols had gone beyond the Surrealist object and the Surrealist's use of free association. In the drawings of Wols, in what is represented, the original object no longer carries a name. In Sartre's words, "They are wholly beyond the resources of language." Jørgen Rømer has similarly expressed that it is not a descriptive method he imploys, that it is a question of a "physical/psychical reaction to the attempt at holding on to a motif."
Jørgen Rømer worked for many years exclusively with printmaking in black and with drawings in black - drawings that often appear as if wrestled from the metal plate. Not until the mid 1980's does he begin to introduce color into his work. One senses it is with great resistance. It is as if black had already absorbed all color. Still colors appear to smoulder in the background and from there move toward the surface light, irridescent as the scales of the butterfly's wing. Color never really escapes darkness. As in the work of Odilon Redon - and artist who also worked in black for many, many years - once color presents itself, its origin lies in the visions on the mind.
In Rømer combined drawings and watercolors done since the mid-1980's, form has the possibility of drawing new traces through matter; the bone of the x-ray image bleeds inside its flesh. Jørgen Rømer drawings now manifest very different aspects of their existence. Many phases - which have yet to be defined and mapped - are traversed with quiet intensity. Fire becomes light, which then partially disappears in smoke. The clear night air draws lines of frost in the corrosive silence. What is fugitive is held back; it gesticulates and escapes. Doubt turns into certainty then falls away. The tactile and associative patterns of matter make one sense beyond any narrative or text.
untitled 1984-1992 pencil & watercolor
There is a suffering in many of Rømer drawings which necessitates that they remain open - that they retain the promise of new possibilities, new manifestations, however fleeting. Many of his works carry two, three or more dates, but this does not accurately reflect how often he took them up in yet another attempt to wrestle out deeper layers of meaning. Many are ruined in the process and have to be destroyed. The artist sometimes becomes too "clumsy"to move into the original state of mind that made the work possible in the first place. Still it is necessary. A friend's death lies buried within the sudden glimpse of frost on a field a fall day in November - and is now buried inside a work that is closing in on itself.
Lasse B. Antonsen-University Art Gallery
November 9 - December 12, l998
University of Massachusets Dartmouth