The text below is extracted from the text “The Beauty and the Truth” by Thyge Christian Fønns-Lundberg in the catalogue for the exhibition.

… What is different – and can be quite surprising in the beginning – is the fact that Lars Physant during the sittings opens up for his own feelings just as freely as he hopes his sitters do. It is clearly a moving and demanding process for him totally to surrender himself to the universe of another person and, so to speak, for a while carry the joys and the sorrows of this person on his shoulders and transform all these impressions to one single expression on paper or canvas.

… Apart from the big emotional engagement that Lars Physant invests in his portraits and his models there is another thing about his working process that is unusual, and which I haven’t encountered before in any other portraitists. For each work Lars Physant makes a lot of different sketches – drawn, painted and photographic – and many of these sketches, especially the painted ones, often have the quality of finished works in their own right.

… For Lars Physant, creating a portrait does not involve pictorially dominating another, but rather building a relationship with the other which is projected back onto the painter himself. From this impulse, a creative circuit of great interest originates. The person painted becomes involved, psychologically, in the genesis of the work. It also requires an emotional commitment by the painter. This circuit develops a set of symmetries: the painter, so to speak, “self-portraits” with the help of the model, while the model, “self-portraits” thanks to the painter’s brush. The portrait is always a self-portrait for both the artist and the subject. Both get to know each other in a different way through the action of creating the portrait.

At skabe billeder af billeder, 2015, can be seen at the exhibition.