Although musically gifted, Krāsons has never sung in a choir, with the possible exception of voluntary-compulsory collective activities in primary school. He’s always been a soloist, although he certainly needs a choir in the background. We learn from his papers that Krāsons studied in the Master Class of Monumental Painting taught by Indulis Zariņš at the Department of Painting of the Latvian Academy of Art, and this background suits Krāsons’ admirably, even though he no longer paints. He’s a leader by conviction, organising the world into substantial masses, establishing major relationships between planes, lines, colours and space in all spheres of creativity, prepared to work in any material and to combine anything at all – whether crowds of people or any other raw material for art. Already in his student years, he displayed a tendency to broaden the conventionally accepted disciplines and genres. For his graduation work at this academic institution, he presented a combination of easel painting and installation, augmenting with physical space the two-dimensional illusion of space, so that the examining committee and his tutor were forced to make what for that time was quite a significant decision ("Chairs" I–III, 1994). In his projects, he’s primarily interested in visually emotional relationships and studies of form, less concerned with self-sufficient intellectual constructs. There’s no doubt that the situation is also determined by the forms of art that Krāsons represents and the demands of teamwork: the ideational helm of exhibition design and stage or film design has to be guided in tandem with the curator or director, and this necessitates a degree of psychological resilience. However, being an accomplished orator, he’s always ready to justify his position verbally.

Krāsons’ artistic and social activities relate to a great variety of different spheres, even dating back to his time at the Rozentāls School, but his later involvement with film might have been predicted. The first significant work in his biography is a short video made in the days of the video boom: Krāsons, a long-haired youth, rushing along on a motorcycle in the company of like-minded maximalists, yelling "shoobeedooba", in the video for the unforgettable hit "You are so fine", as a member of the art students’ band Rīgas Viļņi. To the contemporary eye, perhaps sated with information, this little film seems like a true student work, exploring relationships between classical forms (nude female bodies) and colours, but is also attractive, with its gentle, and at the same time expressive and painterly setting ("Like white", together with Dainis Kļava, 1991, which won an award at a Latvian-French festival of video art). Later, Krāsons used his own body for experimentation: he engaged in studying the capacity of the artist’s cerebral cortex to react to stimuli and translate them immediately into associative images. Projected on a white canvas at increasing speed, to a musical accompaniment, were images to which the hand of the artist had to respond, until some clinical limit in the rate of response was reached (the performance "Lethargy", 1994).

Krāsons’ professional activities, which for many years shaped the artist’s development, began in his student years (1991): he began working as a designer at the Museum of Decorative Applied Arts (MDAA; the present Museum of Decorative Art and Design). Evidently, he was a diligent worker, since a couple of years later he was entrusted with the design of a permanent exhibition. An exhibition designer has a special kind of relationship with art. Collective interests predominate over personal glory, and the egocentric figure of the artist recedes into the background. At the same time, power is concentrated in the hands of such an éminence grise or "second secretary": a masterpiece may be ruined, or it may be imbued with value that it never actually had.

Jurģis Krāsons: "I consider the opportunity of creating an exhibition a magical process. As soon as a work of art or object develops some definite relationship with the space, the setting and other objects, emotional changes occur. Seemingly technical aspects – dimensions, depth and proportions – lead to a definite kind of experience. In my view, exhibitions attract people by the element of surprise. As an exhibition designer, I’m interested in absolute neutrality. The best exhibition is one where I’m absent altogether. The ideal is when a certain basic tone is found, so that the works arrange themselves. Whether the creator of an exhibition has sufficient time and strength to discover it, that’s another matter. All the rest – the size of the space, the possibilities of lighting and the technical equipment – is secondary. The exhibitions I’ve been engaged in recently represent attempts to halt the viewer, caught up in the unavoidably increasing speed of life, and create an optimally sufficient space for every object – so that each work can open up and blossom, as in a kaleidoscope. In some cases, I’ve subordinated the whole exhibition to a single object. But no design should become a value in itself, so that it dominates over the actual works. The success of the exhibition is mainly determined by the curator, the contribution of the exhibition designer and advertising. From then on, it’s all in the hands of the viewer."

Krāsons’ biography as an exhibition designer was already wide-ranging and substantial (the Ansis Cīrulis memorial exhibition at the MDAA in 1993, etc.), when his artistic career took a different course and proceeded at a faster pace. The Second General Latvian Art Exhibition in 1998, the likes of which we have not seen since, was a grandiose Latvian art project, enveloped in scandal and attracting immense public interest. As a result of disagreements among the exhibition organisers, an unplanned separate exhibition "A Different Paradigm" was created within the frame of the project at the Museum of Foreign Art, and Krāsons was invited as a loyal exhibition designer. Such scandals bring up not just dirt, but also golden sand – for the first time, an exhibition led to a discussion of the responsibility and rights of curators and exhibition designers in commenting and interpreting works of art. Once again, Krāsons had overstepped some conventional limits and presented a confrontation and at the same time a dialogue, between the classical image of the permanent museum collection and the contemporary approach of the exhibition. Here, Krāsons was noticed. The door to the world of cinema was open: director Askolds Saulītis invited him to create the design for the film "Tristan and Isolde" (1999). Krāsons continued to undertake major exhibition projects. In one of the most vivid exhibitions in the history of the Museum of Decorative Applied Art, the broken, expressive rhythms and bold colour combinations of Art Deco were echoed in the spatial and semantic structure of the whole exhibition (1999). In the travelling exhibition "Nordic Glass 2000" (2002, MDAA), the original packaging of the works, with all the markings added in the course of their long journey, served as stands for the works presented here. He also created major exhibitions outside the walls of his native museum (the Vilhelms Purvītis memorial exhibition at the State Museum of Art, and "Riga 800. La fibre de la modernité" at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, both in 2001, etc.).