Reviews  New York Post, July 23 2005 by James Gardner   "No Kissing in India" at DCA Gallery, 525W. 22nd St, N.Y.  "...They ( Paintings) are good abstractions, built out of densely layered coats of paint, painstakingly applied and full of busy scrapings and cross-hatchings that make them look almost like collages. Add to that von Wurden's enviable refined sense of color and you have an artist well worth watching."  Art Critic at Berlingske Tidende, Denmark 1997, Mai Misfeldt "The paintings of Carsten von Würden are formally akin to landscape painting. In them one senses a slightly keening nordic tone which somehow connects with the early Danish modernists. But these are not landscape paintings in a traditional sense. There is no horizon, no fixed points of reference, no recognizable shapes. To C.v.W., painting is concerned with the form creating process itself.On the one hand: creation, and on the other: destruction. Two opposing forces required to engender the movement from which a painting may emerge. Thus von Würden is not interested in showing the moment just preceding the creation of form, that is, a preexisting form, one senses that the movement will continue without the crystallization into any ultimate form. But even when speaking of formlessness, of flow, of process-painting, it remains the paradox of painting that in itself, in its definition as oil on a square canvas, it is still form. A number of decisions, regrets, repainting and resolutions. A merciless equation trying to square matter with memory. The unknown X may be given pictorial form as a kind of grace. Inspiration is what Karen Blixen called the moment when that which comes from outside throws light and suddenly allows a connection, not previously imaginable, to be seen. Hence one may surmice that painting demands both expiration, the conscious work of the artist, and inspiration, a relief coming from outside. Thus C.v.W.'s motives are a flux, surfaces of color without centre or direction, while the painting itself remains persistently present. It has a body and a radiance which becomes almost tangible when one faces it. It is painted in a thick and multi-layered fashion and is in itself a tiny landscape model, a plateau where forgotten sediments break through and splash onto the canvas colors from a long forgotten past. C.v.W. does not excel in expressive painting, since he does not confess to the belief that the human being has a firm self to be expressed. Humans, like the rest of the world, are in a continual process of change. The Musician, theoretician and artist John Cage, whose theoretical base was found upon Indian philosophy and Zen, once wrote that when he discovered India everything he said started to change. This train of thought is shared by Carsten von Würden, who, through the past  years, has divided his time between Copenhagen and his house at the foothold of the mountain Arunachala in the south of India. The close encounter with so very different a culture and nature has made its mark on von Würden's painting. Not in the form of exotic features, but as a phrased rhythm and a movement which both attracts and repels. C.v.W. is a beauty-seeking painter, a colorist who knows his craft. Honey-yellow, glass-green, dark purple, citrus light, azure. Beauty is, like anything else, something continually subject to change. It is constituted and destroyed in matter. It persists as a fragile thread of dreams, weaving its way, in and out of flesh and soil, decay and growth."
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