Allan Madsen

Allan Madsen - Still Life with Onions, Oil on canvas, 36" x 36"

Danish by birth, the well-travelled Allan Madsen now lives and works in the Spanish province of Murcia. His first artistic incarnation was as a musician specialising in lute music of the Renaissance. These two interests, music and the Renaissance, have certainly crossed over into his paintings. The patterning in the backgrounds of his still life paintings betrays a decided musicality whilst the texture he achieves is redolent of Italian murals. Giotto comes to mind when one studies the rich texture which is built up by the use of colour. Because of Allan’s use of pentimenti, it is as though one is in the Arena Chapel in Padua looking at the underpainting coming through due to the natural patination of age.

Allan Madsen - Still Life with Bowl, Oil on canvas, 37" x 37" Sold

It is this, the sense of age, which renders the works so tranquil. There is no need to explain or to vocalise them; one wishes merely to absorb them.  Influenced by the austerity of Juan Sánchez Cotán and the calm melancholy of Francisco de Zurbarán, Allan has brought an alchemy to bear upon the bodegones so beloved of the Spanish. The ineffable wistfulness of his figures, achieved by his deft use of sfumato, that subtle gradation of tone and colour used to blur the contours of a form, leads us right back to Leonardo da Vinci.

Allan Madsen - Still Life with Grapes, Oil on canvas, 35" x 35" Sold

Informed by the great masters as his work undoubtedly is, the chromatic intensity of the backgrounds can be read as pure abstraction. Around and beyond the meticulously painted objects in his compositions, he has deconstructed, tessellated and then reconstructed the space to create a vibrating, tactile ground which engenders a sensuality akin to some form of not trompe l’oeil but trompe le sens!

Síle Connaughton-Deeny