After E

E is for Everything. A heavy sky and the earth below it, the darkness and the flowers, the nature which is poisonous and healing and open like a wound, the faith and the sign and the picture and the color, nights and days in motion and standstill. The beginning and the end of a life where life itself plays out in between, is reproduced and repeated, alternately gray, rosy, morning colored, an infected matte black.

E is for Everything. It is also a title. Morten Knudsen gave this title to one of his pictures, and since then many others. E can be for everything visible in these pictures and it is also all the invisible, the absence, the incessant lack. E can be for Ernst, a son who lived for six days and six nights before he lost his life and disappeared from the physical world and remained in things that usually exist longer than human beings: the thought, the sign, the picture, the color.

E and Ernst are everywhere in Morten Knudsen’s pictures. The letter almost sparkles of memorial, but the person is not to be seen at first or second glance. E can be everything, as can rosy and something that blooms—and not least abstraction. Morten Knudsen’s pictures neither look like history nor biography, and they’re also much more than that. Doubtless, many of them are beautiful, like light and gardens and quiet symmetry, and they don’t appear uninterested in beauty. A minutely wax-like surface, persistent drops of the sugariest pink, deep darknesses beneath something flourishing or contagious. But in front of what’s beautiful—and really is very beautiful, on those poignant spectrums where visuality falls short anyway—the pictures look like a method, too. If you may: a method of living.

If E can be anything, it might also be the case that everything started lacking or fading when E disappeared. E must be called forth and insisted upon in these pictures, just as living itself must be insisted upon. The method is a monotony because it is needed for upholding a somewhat upright state through a time of dissolution. Pictures full of E; so many of them during the six years that has passed since Ernst ceased and E began. They accumulate in Morten Knudsen’s life and studio; they accumulate in exhibitions, amass in a scattered monument over a son and the absence of a son. As a motif, too, E is conspicuous by its absence, its almost invisible contours. E has been cut out of the black surfaces of Morten Knudsen’s black pictures, not painted on top of them. The sign shines and appears as emptiness. Or E is a white contour, a suggestion of something chiseling its way further into the gaze, perhaps also the heart, because it’s harder to see. When E became a memory, it probably was so for a time, that the real and remaining world was narrowed down to white, black, gray, repetitions.

EE

EE

E

E

There are six E’s in Morten Knudsen’s exhibition; Ernst lived for six days and six nights; there are 12 pictures in Morten Knudsen’s exhibition. A sustained, persistent need for logic and system through the most dire loss of meaning. A number of simple principles as canes through a trembling time. These signs like an alphabet through a condition where language doesn’t suffice. E, spiral, flower, some kind of cross, some kind of horizon? And all of that which doesn’t look like anything but subtly creased surfaces, the kind of creased surfaces that can be nonchalant carelessness or the beginning of a breakdown. Morten Knudsen’s pictures don’t feel like figuration, but are not fully abstract either. Rather, they’re saturated by something that is recognizable, though it doesn’t really exist in real life. The flowers are infected or are they cells; they’re also gushing and rather joyful in ways that pink and red are, after all. The rain is black or is it tears; the sky falls down or is that indeed what blooms while the earth is empty. Eternity is gray as a floor and almost impossible to see. And then there is E E E E E E, steep and white as days and nights towering up.

The day and the night, skies and bottoms, black, white, the floor and the afterlife, E and E, the sprouting and the dead, a consistent absence and glimpses of presence, or is it the other way around. Morten Knudsen’s pictures are almost constantly rooted in some immense dualisms. A kind of paramount dualizing, even though the exhibition appears quite idiosyncratic in its brightly colored, rain gray, ink black, fragile, and edifying whole. But in almost all of the pictures couples prevail, and their connection is established within the compositions, palettes, motifs, while they’re also externally organized in couples. Two and two, that’s how they mostly hang, an expression of what could both be understood as a search for symmetry and a recognition of meaninglessness.

Perhaps these dualities, couples, opposites, perhaps they capsize when catastrophe arrives. Or are they sharpened? What is the difference between a day and a night when you’re mourning a lost son, what difference is there between agony and a blooming spring, is bright red distinguishable from sick yellow or an all-devouring brownish, when most of your inner and outer world is anyway steeped in a one-dimensional gray?

E is black and white, at first a wonder of light, since then a long darkness, what appears to be a flowery meadow could as well be a graveyard, and beneath the flowers and the loss, there is also gray. Most of Morten Knudsen’s pictures start with being gray, just as most days do before the sun is strong enough to color our surroundings. In that sense you could also say: gray is a color of beginning.

Unbearable as well as delighted days begin somewhere, begin they must. And pictures of the impossible set off from a place similar to pictures that could be mistaken for romance, optimism, or perhaps even glimpses of something carefree. This neutral, numb grayness in some of Morten Knudsen’s pictures is neither devoid of intention nor significance, nor a kind of own beauty—but it still is some kind of empty place. And so, the emptiness can be an insurmountable main character, within a mental state and within an image, or it can be the naked ground from where something new can grow.

E grows. There are more and more because Morten Knudsen is living and working and maintaining E. Remembers and creates E. You could say: More and more of Everything by way of the lives that are still living and handling the days, though the days will probably always possess a more ferociously gray bottom. The pictures grow, they both increase and repeat themselves. It is probably so: living is repeating. Days, life patterns, relations, seasons, longings, behaviors. Predictability is an indisputable joy for those who really lack it—you need to hold on to something if what we can foresee is acutely threatened. And when a new life ceases, it is one of the most irreconcilable violations of predictability, and when a new life ceases it is excluded from partaking in the cyclical fate of repetition. That remains for the living to take on. Picture after picture, day after day, upholding the colors still available to a foggy gaze, perhaps such colors are the most hotheaded. Continue the spiral, perceive nature, also just completely prosaic without turning it into sentimental landscape. Stretching your canvases, paint your preferred skies, make your faint or loud imprints on the gray beginnings.

E is for all kinds of things. The more E’s there exist, the wider the sign probably becomes. The more and the longer E exists in a shape that isn’t a human shape. It is not nearly a replacement of the human, humans and pictures are incomparable, but the movement through Morten Knudsen’s pictures feels like an insistence that E was alive and bright and defined and that time is turning E into something almost limitless. The sign of a happiness and a heart, which now lives in all kinds of other things. Everything? It is the destiny of monuments to be placeholders for something missed, perhaps to both soothe and underline loss.

It is said that grief doesn’t change, but scale does. Perhaps a broken interior shrinks accordingly to the monument growing, perhaps a broken exterior becomes easier to endure, when a still sprouting bloom makes its way through gray, and when a light eternity is augured alongside all the painted darkness. Morten Knudsen’s squares grows and shrinks.

And the alphabet extends after E.

Originally published on occasion of Morten Knudsen's solo exhibition STICKY EYES (paintings, collages, drawings, and monuments) at O—Overgaden, Copenhagen, 2026.