Eternal Odysseys Grethe Hald, Artist, art reporter, and cultural journalist Jan Savensen's graphic leaves form a distinctive world which entices wandering. We find shapes, introverted and self-embracing as if brooding primeval secrets, in fragmented landscapes. Flaked details of patterned ornament communicate mute signs of traces while a stray dog barks under the crescent some "Other Place" (Annet Sted). The artist Jan Svensen appears to alternate effortlessly between painting and graphics, and the different techniques seem to enhance each other's language. The artist himself feels that details from a period of painting may be transferred into graphic art. Hence, in his own words, "he pulls himself over the threshold." A common denominator for Jan Svensen's varieties of figurative art, which springs easily to mind, is the Journey. The familiar expression "he who travels has a story to tell" is applicable to Svensen. In his art, 'the story' is told by way of personal signs, elements and fragments whose meaning is somewhat unfinished. Accordingly, his works have something in common with the nature of the journey itself, the journey into the unknown: we watch, discern, believe and interpret. The graphic artist says, "I saw this." But did he penetrate beyond and inside? Did he completely understand everything or did he leave his thoughts to continue their own journey into the unknown, where source of imagination meets impulses from the outside world to create new kingdoms as yet unseen? Our difficulty in forcing the jungle of signs on our way into Jan Svensen's painted world is decided by our mental luggage: whether the sharp powers of our thought will cut machete-like through to the secrets of this kingdom or our tentative, long, and intuitive wandering will gently lead us to the goal - if there ever was one. As the real journey involves movement between geographical points, the human mind moves accordingly, albeit perhaps in its own speed: our inner selves come hesitantly lurking behind, and years may pass before we appreciate what we have seen. Such a pilgrimage has lots in common wit our general experience of art. In the same way that we are willing to accept 'other-ness' when travelling in unknown countries, we encounter the foreign landscape presented by any new work of art: with an open mind and efforts to keep most of our superstition locked up at the bottom of our backpack. On a par with the old, Japanese tradition of haiku poetry, in which a few precise words indicate an everyday event, a landscape and a temperature, and thereby unfold a mood, Jan Svensen's simplistic signs and imagery prepare the ground for our excursion into the borderlands between poetry and tangible reality. Upon encountering his graphic art, as in meeting a partly closed world, we may, aided by the visual cues of the painting itself, seek increasingly deeper in search of meaning; meaning intelligible to ourselves. And new paths will be revealed, as secret doors in an impregnable wall, paths leading to perspective and insight. Such is the manner in which Jan Svensen's graphic odyssey leads us into the inner chambers, the most sacred ones, subconscious and intuitive rooms of the human mind. In his paintings, the artist unites contemplation with energy in an effort to touch life itself, both in his own inner chambers and in the world at large. Reclining creatures recurs. In Polarnatt ("Polar night") his body statically suffers the snowflakes. He becomes Poseidon himself, a divine Sculpture resting gigantically at the bottom of the ocean, under the silvery Greek archipelago and the fountainhead of western culture. In a Himmelskip two different creatures meet on their way towards the unknown, but they are "sailing the same ship." Considered through an exploration of Jan Svensen's pictorial universe, the titleUspesifisert reise ("Unspecified Journey") seems ironic and at the same time eternally naked; what greater certainty is there in life that the relative vagueness of out journey through it? The artist shows us what this journey consists in; ceaseless search for contact and sporadic encounters - and our personal loneliness. In this way, his paintings mark the experience of the moment as well as existence seen in an infinite perspective. Jan Svensen travels anew on his sheets of aluminium. Each time he colours and places the moist paper across the printing plate's different field of colour, his motif makes a new journey through consciousness and printing processes. He has walked the road to independent artistic expression on his own, trodden independent paths flaked by others' experience, others' expressions. The graphic trail existed long before him: medieval wood prints, the first furrowing scratches on the copperplate, and modernity's numerous possibilities to pick and choose materials to suit the graphic artist's needs. Svensen employs a mixture of techniques characterised by monotypicality and collage, the latter achieved through fractured printing sheets. His pure lines face clear shades of red, yellow and orange, often against an even background of blackish blue. Warm earthen colours promote South American and Pompeian associations as if the pigment was scraped from the pyramids of Tikal or the walls of "the house of mysteries". The artist, his art, and we as audience meet on "the road to Zung" (Veien til Zung). In Jan Svensen's words, "A place we rarely find, yet we all search for it." The way all these journeys actually constitute the eternal odyssey into ourselves. Maturity has less to do with age Lilliana Matasa Master of Art Education La Victoria-Venezuela John Fowles has asserted that maturity has less to do with age than with a condition of self-knowledge, and this condition of mature understanding emerges in Jan Svensen's works. His artistic universe is wide-ranging - from the creation of the world and its level of expression unto the created things themselves. Thus we find the created world in five levels in his graphic work Poseidon. It is reduced to three levels in his works Veien til Zung ("The Road to Zung") and Møteplass ("Meeting place"), ending up on one level in Annet Sted ("Some other place") and Løshund, Port Angell ("Stray Dog, Port Angell"). However, the universe as the artist perceives it is not empty. The presence of animals and humans speak to us about life in the created world. A lonely man confronted with himself, couples talking to us about the theme of duality (Uspesifisert reise, "Unspecified Journey") or sequences of five people announcing the quintupleness of being exemplify the level of maturity and depth the artist has attained in his creative works. His skilled mastery of two different techniques - graphics and painting - adds coherence to our understanding of Svensen's works. His graphic expressions, striking and condensed, reveals humanity and its levels of communion through clear-cut lines and shapes. When these are transferred to painting, the same elements loose their material existence. They are dissolved, wrapped up by transparent strokes of the brush - an effect only painting may provide. Upon transferral to painting, primary and secondary colours found in his graphic works go through the same metamorphosis as does figures. They are changed into tertiary colours, mixed, and reach out into the universe, so that they leave their material existence to seek refuge in a celestial world. The earthen colours in his paintings suggest a Mother Nature in which all colours merge. Diffuse shades of black and grey reveal the presence of Light. The obscure silhouette which appear in his works lead us back to a continual evolutionary process involving all creation. These are examples of a message communicates - beyond doubt - how Man's quest is to transgress material creation and merge with Light. An artist who values Man as highest being of the universe, and indicates life's possibility for expansion and continuity - as does Svensen with his artistic zigzag trails - has reached this stage of self-apprehension which is the source of maturity.