The dual palette
Finn Have is a hard-working painter daring to set himself a number of ever greater challenges
within a precisely defined area. This is a classical stimulation of the landscape in all its
possible nuances of lighting and weather, be they when the canvas is set in the Danish beech
woods, by the gushing waterfalls of the far North or in the green breathing-spaces of a
metropolitan park.
As an artist, he has, of course, his stories, his experiences and not least his visions, but to
an increasing degree it is as if his pictures find their own way. An intuitively painted form
inspired by fluctuating rock formations, muted earth colours or dripping cliffs turn out, with a
certain dejà vu, to contain a body, distorted, twisted and as if crying out, but a body
nevertheless. At second glance, the despair is succeeded by extended, liberated limbs on
the way from the lucent lightness of the sky to the shining blue of the water: not a willed
image but more an after-image that gives the immediate an extra dimension, an experience
of closeness between picture and beholder.
Duality has always made up an important part of Finn Have's work. Earlier, this manifested
itself in the dialogue between colleagues in the Labyrinth group, which throughout the eighties
was the focus for topical experiments inspired by external currents as well as a spacious
arena for up-and-coming talents. Some were experienced and knew their own area, others
tested the boundaries project by project.Here we find an experimenting Finn Have working
his work through collage, observation and installation until finally in 1986 being captivated by
a project at an artists' symposium in Germany. This project, which with hindsight explains
many later pictures, comprised a physical registration of what happens when the sun shines
through foliage, when the rain changes the colours of the wood's underbrush and when the
painting has to follow the form.
This turning point meant an unobtrusive but precise distancing from earlier experiments and
more collective forms of expression. An increasing consciousness concerning the fruitful
duality, which still had so many facets, demanded time. In the last decade it has been the
journeys that have made up the fulcrum of the dialectic. As soon as the days by the North
Sea were over, the need to seek fields heavy with mould arose. Hardly had the plane taken
off from a sojourn in the South than the dream of cold cliffs appeared as symbols in the
coming pictures. When the warmth, with its golden colours and heavy surfaces, was the
challenge, the contrast appeared in the cold with light, shiny tones enveloped in glimpses
of sunlight and sprouting growth.
Finn Have has the courage to allow his strong intuition to be followed by action. This becomes
a matter of travels alternating with quiet periods of work. As in the pictures, he also has the
need to allow the experiences to come through and out before the demand for new concrete
expressions makes itself felt. This is reflected in the working process, where some pictures
are painted on the spot, sketchily and rapidly, some at a slower tempo. After many days, it
s necessary to take a breather to give himself time to look at the pictures and then work
through them again. Sometimes this takes the form of after-images which in the painting
process can stretch over a number of years. At other times, it happens in tight sequences,
where the whole studio is populated with canvases in progress, under change and on the way.
In these processes, it becomes important to give a place to as many different expressions
as it is possible to work with when one canvas is large and another is as small as a
sketching-block. Not that Finn Have works on preparatory studies in the traditional sense,
where the small work is a study for the large one. For he does not do that. Rather he seeks
a clarification of where the boundary for the light or the dark is to be found, how far away the
horizon can secrete itself or how strong the foreshortenings have to be to create a sequence
of trees, branches or stones. There has been a strong development towards finding precisely
these in most recent years. The formal elements are no longer delimited ornaments, but enter
rather in to an investigation of the surface and the optical perspective. The colour has become
more nuanced, more sonorous, giving a greater spatiality and depth.
Despite the marked stages of development that are visible in the works of recent years, the
sensuality is still intact. Finn Have is able to transpose his constant fascination with sunlight,
the intensity of colour and the energy of volumes of water into his pictures, so that they are
saturated with a pulsating rhythm, a pictorial realization of the eternal cycle of the seasons
tself. Of course, the individual piece of foliage, the glinting surface of the forest lake or the
beach's recognizable stones and seaweed do not make up a proper cycle. It is the profound
fascination with the transient, forming with its disappearance the germ of new life, a life
conceived from the seed capsule's intuitive response towards the warmth and the ripening to
the water flowing from the brook, when the sun takes power again after the frozen embrace of
many months.
Finn Have invites one into this cycle with his pictures, which are painted with a deep respect for
nature and with a constant curiosity about experiencing sensuality as a necessary part of the
essence of art, at once transient and present, close and distant, single and dual.
Lisbeth Tolstrup, AICA, art critic
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