Adam Sorensen

The Electric Light Landscape

- Gabe Scott

Adam Sorensen has established himself as a torchbearer for traditions of landscape painting and its vitality within a contemporary context. Steeped in a broad scope of art history, Sorensen references a variety of Asian and European movements, while injecting unique personal interpretations blurring eras, but in renderings keenly aware of the spiritual connection landscape painting offers. Sorensen crafts a spellbinding, allegorical realm, inviting the viewer to participate.

Sorensen’s fantastical worlds are created through vertical and horizontal grid-like structures of light and dark shapes, forming tantalizing patterns that entice the eye. A smooth veneer and graphic sensibility seal the panorama of soft-edged forms into the periphery, while prismatic inserts provide radiant support. Each landscape expands through a series of fractal reactions, unfolding each new detail in response to the previous. There is a rhythmic quality to the evolving, echoing patterns as they reassemble themselves to emphasize the upward inflection of their grand arrangements. The juxtaposition of cool overtones and warm undertones throb softly within the image, delivering a pulsating vitality that transforms the entire vista into a living, breathing organism.

These expansive vignettes are influenced by Adam's interaction with the natural world, as well as his enthusiasm for old reference books. Ambiguity is an important aspect of Sorensen’s earthly allusions, and at their core, his paintings are built on abstract emotion, rather than an explicit narrative. Bathed in a vibrant energy and soaked in sumptuous chromatics, these environments are energy fields of density and optical resonance. Light possesses a vaporous quality, which somehow oscillates somewhere between an infrared haze and the residue of a psychedelic sunset.