Mark Alsterlind

            

              

                

              

      

The hidden movement of nature

Mark Alsterlind was born in the USA in 1954. He moved to France in 1981, quickly and confidently developing a style of painting using non-figurative forms to bring the pigmented surface to life, and employing collage and mixed media techniques as his modes of composition.

He soon began to paint in account books and old log-books which acted as a more substantial and essential support for his work. Alsterlind stayed with non-figurative painting, which he had practised from the outset, but from the pure abstractions of his past work there started to emerge semi-animal and semi-organic forms.

This evolution took place in a series of large-format works. Painted flat on the ground, they consisted of layers of paper, stuck one on top of the other until a single image was born of the covering of all those beneath it, and the texture of which was the result of this very process of stratification.

He developed this most individual style of painting with increasing confidence, working in very large formats and concentrating more and more on the textural element. This texture is the result not only of the different layers of paint applied by the artist, but also of traces left by rain, wind and other random factors, as these paintings are left outside the studio, exposed to the elements, for long periods before being reworked, subjected to further layers of colour and more soakings in the rain.

Little by little, forms only perceptible to the artist appear out of this chaos, the essence of the elements trapped between the coloured strata, the natural world suspended within the four corners of the picture.

These are not paintings which set out to be representational as such, but neither are they wholly abstract. We can somehow sense their origins, their essence, and the laws which govern the natural world have played a part in their creation.

This is at the heart of Mark Alsterlind’s painting – in a quiet and reflective way he tries to find some order in the natural world without seeking to represent it in any literal sense, allowing the images to develop of their own volition and struggling to provide them with a sufficiently vast pictorial space.

The lifeblood of these images lies in the very texture of the works themselves, in the twigs, leaves and crumbs of paint, all of which have played a part in the creation of the paintings which, in turn, have developed a dimension of meaning and an intense depth.

In spite of the large scale of his works, Mark Alsterlind is a painter who explores the intimacies of nature, its best-kept secrets. His inspiration recalls that of the cave painter, whose total immersion in the natural world inspired the making of those symbolic marks which tell us so much about the universe.

Vianney Lacombe

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