In stark contrast to many of his colleague, who at some point settled into a fixed visual language, Erik A. Frandsen remains a true anarchist at heart: he resists convention and expectation, driven by an inner compulsion to explore, renew, and reinvent. For him, experimentation is never a means to an end, but a fundamental way of working. Curiosity, restlessness, and a drive to test limits define his practice. Mastery, in Frandsen’s world, is never final. Even a perfected technique or refined form is simply absorbed into the artist’s ever-expanding toolbox.

Frandsen mixes techniques freely, shifts perspectives across the large canvases, and seduces the viewer with his bold sense of color. For him, no single subject or method holds particular value. It’s not about painting per se; it’s about the making of a painting. At the core of each painting is a certain energy that Frandsen seeks to bring forth. To do so, he draws from a personal repertoire: glimpses of everyday life, cultural and historic references, his ever-present flowers, architecture, delicate brush strokes, expansive surfaces, the deceit of perspective, and, above all, a rare and instinctive feel for color.

At its most condensed, Paintings 2025 might be introduced quite simply: these are paintings about painting. Sure, there are myriad references in the exhibition: gestures to the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, inspiration from the now almost forgotten furniture designer Bodil Kjær, or references to the Nazis' hidden art treasures. But all of this merely serves as material — building blocks in the painter’s construction of what, to him, is the only object of importance: the painting in and of itself.

The respected art historian Lennart Gottlieb put it with striking clarity when describing Frandsen’s previous exhibition, Dissociation, also at Hans Alf Gallery:

“There are still artists untouched by the joy of self-centeredness or programmed sensitivity and narrative pleasure in their own or others’ destinies. One of them is Erik A. Frandsen. […] If I were English and a well-versed poet, I might have written, as T.S. Eliot did to Ezra Pound in 1915: ‘I distrust and detest Aesthetics, when it cuts loose from the Object, and vapours in the void, but you have not done that.’ Eliot nails precisely what Frandsen still achieves: capturing the sublime in the intimate — rendered, say, in a trembling stillness: an empty chair, flowers, a hovering dish of fruit and cabbage, or whatever it may be — set against a grey, seemingly metaphorical void or amidst an opulent accumulation of things, alongside an image of a cabin or a Matisse-like odalisque.”

Erik A. Frandsen’s Paintings 2025 is a master class in the making of a painting, not just in painting. Anyone with a genuine interest in the art of painting would do well to start here.