artfool.se nr 2/2012

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My representative paintings are enormously representative: it is difficult for me to liberate myself from an interesting motif and let colours or form govern.

However: I find it natural that when colour is the starting point the result is non representative, but when the motif is central motif governs and colour becomes secondary.

These last years I have gone back to still lives, to people, to anything representative. It is nice to tell a story clearly.

We differentiate between representative, or realistic, abstract and concrete painting respectively. ”Concrete” here has a unexpected connotation (at least in Swedish) as nothing like my paintings on this side is meant; the definition is ”nonfigurative art of abstract-geometrical character” (quote from the Swedish National Encyclopedia (NE) 1993, my translation).

NE tells us that a group of artists introduced the term ”concrete art” in Paris 1930 in a manifesto. Concrete art is an offshoot from the russian constructivists who, like Vladimir Tatlin ”wanted to free art from every trace of imitation and instead stress the art work as an autonomous object in itself” (NE, 1993, my translation). I have no wish to imitate, but sometimes to narrate explicitly.