Page 50 - ART NOW Internationally Recognized Artists

GRO FOLKAN
art now Lives and works in Tromsoe and Oslo, Norway

https://www.grofolkan.no

Within the Layers: Paintings of Gro Folkan:
The dynamic paintings of Gro Folkan reflect the artist’s efforts to explore
the pictorial language of evolution of female body and its movement
within time through the activity of artmaking. For the artist this process
expresses her most private moments in which she attempts to articulate
her sense of self as a medium between the forces, both personal and
transpersonal.
Folkan does this with enormous assurance and vitality. Not surprisingly,
in her notes she writes: ”My pictures are instruments like runes, used
for thousands of years by Northern peoples to invoke hidden aspects of
reality. The real pictures, the images are not the lines and colors on my
canvases, but the images coming into being in the mind of the onlooker.”
Keeping these remarkable words in mind, it becomes clear that the
aesthetic dimension in the Folkan’s work incorporates a certain amount
of figural and abstract expressionism. The artist’s moving paintings fulfill
one of the most important functions of the artististic experience, namely
to arrange sensations in such a way so that they, in Roger Fry’s words
”arouse in us deep emotions, through which this feeling of a special tie
with the man who expressed them becomes very strong.”
The best visual work says the inexpressible using forms and colors.
Indeed, art is the paramount language of the unsayable in which, as
Theodor Adorno claims, it is seen as a dialectic between the intuition
and rationality, (as it) ”attempts …to approximate thing and expression
so closely that difference disappears. ” In the Gro Folkan’s paintings the
sense of confidence is mixed with an element of pure, urgent sagacity in
spite of the aesthetic rowdiness with which the eye is initially confronted.
The compelling contradiction sensed as the works’ clearly organized
frenzy demonstrates the paint-er’s exceedingly suave commitment
to the essence of art, what Irving Sandler has defined as ”The …way  Dance, 2020 acrylic on canvas, aluminium 59x39.3 in. | 150x100 cm.
of hightening safety feeling… through the modification and control of What kind of lines under the seed´s capsule? 2017 acrylic on canvas, copper,
perception.” Folkan’s paintings can be perceived as filled with a type of oxidized silver and copper, 52.9x47.2 in. | 160x120 cm. 
Lifted from Earth, 2017 acrylic on canvas, aluminium, oxidized silver, metal
mystifying enigma that bears close scrutiny. Hovering between being dust, 59x35.4 in. | 150 x 90 cm. 
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