ERIK LINDMAN

Can paintings and sculptures be made today by anyone other than a poor fool, a holy fool, a pure fool, a Parseh-Fal?

A grouping of recently executed large-scale paintings will be presented in dialogue with smaller paintings on panel started four years ago. They are haunted by rotting vocabularies, disingenuously suggesting associative landscapes. Subtle chromatic plays and visible, direct brushstrokes remained that I would have once painted over, like spraying perfume to hide the corpse of expression these images once flirted with but now uncomfortably embrace.

Sculptures, here presented as unimposing monuments to haptic experience, mirror the central forms anchored in the paintings’ layers of pigment. The pure fool, enlightened by compassion¹, embalms found wood, styrofoam and metal in epoxy resin, like old bones holding new flesh.

My allusion should not be confused with a desire to illustrate morality. Here, art bubbles up between the fool’s fingers joyfully dragged in an opaque sea, colliding unintentionally with the greasy dead. Wandering into a thicket of expiring tongues with a smile on my face, I catch what flies out.

-Erik Lindman, 2019

1 Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor