John Hansens paintings explores a delicate balance between nature experience and the forum of abstractions, a central part of the Nordic artistic desire to dive into this borderline territory where so many has gone, from Strindberg to Kirkeby and Kenneth Nielsen. It is an arena of art where the possibilities seem endless, but where it at the same time can go terribly wrong if the artist does not develop his own rythm and understands how to make the motive balance both within the frame of the canvas, as well as in the relationship between nature experience and its reflection in the abstraction. John Hansen understands this challenge, thus his paintings communicates simply but powerful from the canvas out into the room."
"One could say that the artist looks out into the world, thereupon turns and sees (or crawls) into the mirror from Alice in Wonderland, where everything changes and new ways of seeing and understanding are created. John Hansen works still deeper into the possibilities of the painting in relation to the voyages he has taken, and where Brazil has made a decisive impression. He sees possibilities in the plentuful colours of the earth and experiences the impact of light, whereupon he so to speak distil an expression that he recreates on canvas. The expression is a special combination of light and darkness, but one can also use the language of music and say that 'major' meets 'minor' or - with the language of poetry - that the lyrical meets the dramatic.
But it can also, as with Turner and Strindberg, be that the sky meets the sea. The possibilities are endless, but in the end it is a meeting between forces, which for John Hansen is an area in the painting that bears in it a special intensity in form of light, or because strong surfaces encounters each other. In this meeting the painting arises, bit it's experience and interpretation is based on the intensity of the one seeing, as well as on space and light in the room. Thus his paintings are never the same, when someone else experiences the ones you experienced yourself. An endless series of dialogue possibilities appears between the surroundings and the paintings, dialogues that the artist has left for us to understand and interpret, because John Hansens own suggestions lies in the silent an colourful language of the painting."
Author and art critic Erik Meistrup