Jan Isak Saether: A Figurative Painter of Our Time

The work of Jan Isak Saether seems like a solitary voice running through the complicated orchestra of sounds comprising the world of contemporary art. In an era in which innovation for its own sake is prized over content, and the visual image is subjected to every conceivable deliberate distortion and violation, Saether's art concerns itself with articulating its themes in the language of the human imagination, a language he feels to be inseparable from the reality of natural imagery. It is his concern with the sacred power of the imagination and its offspring, the visual image, which distinguishes Saether from the media-conscious and trend-conformist seekers of notoriety so frequently encountered today.

A native of Norway, Saether has lived in Los Angeles since 1974. Trained at the National Academy of Fine Art and the National Arts College of Oslo, he is represented by works in the collections of the National Gallery in Oslo, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences, and the Public Collection of the Norwegian Arts Council.

Since his residency in the United States, Saether has held one-man shows at the Design Center in Los Angeles, at Gallery One in Beverly Hills, and at the Andrea Ross Gallery in Santa Monica. He was a participant in Broad Spectrum, the Olympic Arts Festival's exhibit of outstanding Los Angeles artists, and recently was featured in a group show at the Riverside Art Museum in Los Angeles.

As co-founder of the unique art school, Bruchion, Jan Saether has been responsible for the dissemination of a method of teaching drawing and painting that is in some respects revolutionary; it is based on a recognition that there is an underlying language of basic elements that is found in all images depicting form and space, representational and otherwise, regardless of style.

It was the discovery of this "language", and the establishment of its efficacy as a teaching tool through several years of using it with his students, that convinced Saether that there is indeed an intimate relationship between the experience of seeing and the activity of the imagination; that in fact, even "abstraction" obeys the laws of this visual language because human experience is grounded in it, since forms and idea are wedded together in the image by means of this language.

Beyond notion of style and the polemics of esthetic philosophies, is the hope of an immediacy of expression in art which can connect us to the living pulse of human experience, carrying us through fragmentation and toward wholeness. This is the kind of immediacy which united Velasquez and Rembrandt, Goya and Bacon; and it takes shape in a capacity to exalt and disturb, to attract and repel, simultaneously, in other words: to entangle, transform, and redeem, through the intermediary of the visual image. As Shakespeare and Beckett are connected through their commitment to the use of spoken words, so is Saether related to the masters of past and recent times, by his consummate use of the language of the image and by his empowerment of the image.

For in Saether's art we are once again free to choose rather than be coerced into response: the paintings reveal their secrets through a painterly music that offers more than one path or passageway for the viewer. One is aware of the alchemy of paint and pigment, of the abstract play of forms emerging and disappearing into light and shadow, and of the linear rhythms that echo throughout the whole; but also one senses an invitation to enter into the spell of beings, places and events which beckon to us mysteriously from a world almost like our own, but where the paradox of existence and the drama of being, when penetrated, become a banquet of love in which the opposites confront each other in a dance of beauty and passionate striving.

Art can do no more than this, and Saether's images, silent and deep, challenge and invite us to demand no less, from our art and from ourselves. Finally, Saether's paintings and sculptures make clear the message that the true voice of our time is the coive of the human individual, desiring and reaching out to embrace the sacredness of wholeness and authenticity, a reality inclusive of self and other in the highest sense.

Charles Coffman
December 1990

Charles Coffman is a painter and writer living and working in Los Angeles.