"Figure of light" 1995 170x200 cm acrylic

" Tord Lager seeks to describe man coming forward into the reality from an unknown origin, man geting out of chaos, light and fire...."

Rolf Anderberg  1995

   early paintings

It is a plain fact, though one not always recognised as such, that no matter how much it might appear to shift in style and interest over an extended career, an artist's work will always come together in the end, all of a piece from first to last. The hand may grow more subtle, the eye more knowing and acute: the informing, underlying sensibility remains the same.

Tord Lager, who is now in his middle fifties, first came to prominence in the late 1960s with work that was directly figurative. While not being photo-realist in itself, it openly made use of the photograph as reference, and shared with photo-realists and some pop-artists an interest in the empty modern interior, the figure in the interior and the figure in isolation, psychologically as well as physically alienated and alone. He then extended his imagery to the landscape, which again he treated in a near-photographic manner, finding his subjects in the featureless distance and the repetitive, universal anonymity of the open road and of the motorway.

Over the intervening years it might seem that his work has by now become utterly different. Gone is the particular reference, the observed image, gone the smooth impersonal sophistication of technique. But is that really to say that the hand is any the less sophisticated or the eye less critical? More to the point, is that to say imagery and formal interests have changed? Certainly the figures are still there, though now creatures of the educated imagination, schematic, formalized and conventional, in the sense that Picasso's "Demoiselles" are conventional. Lager has clearly long since turned away from immediate contemporary concerns to embrace a broader sweep of modernism. His work of 1990s is redolent in particular of early cubism and its immediate antecedents, not in any merely affective or dependent way, but by positive critical choice. It remains entirely personal to him. And does it matter that he has thus distanced himself from the currency of the avant-garde? 
Not a bit.

The surface is scored and scraped, leaving the history of the painting in the paint. The image are tentative, exploratory, ambiguous in their realization. The space is shallow, frieze-like, theatrical, with the figures it contains disposed separately along is as though on a stage before the curtain. And yet for all the differences, we are back with those alienated figures of 30 years ago, with their backs turned towards us in a row, back to the shadowy, ambiguous figure in the doorway. Though so very different, it is all of a piece.

London, February 1997
William Packer



Tord Lager
Vitehall, Kungsbacka kulturhus 1995

Rune Borell

  about Tord Lagers exhibition at Vitehall, Kungsbacka Kulturhus 1996

" With his eminent knowledge of painting, Tord Lager does create and design pictures of people who are seemingly acting like figures in antique dramas, man in struggle or in rest, man who in frankness face the spectators. His paintings have a bright human message, a belief in man..."

Rune Borell 1995

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