Page 51 - ART NOW Internationally Recognized Artists

completely non-representational yet retaining a residual figural impulse
in which bodies and their movements are referenced by an obligingly
oblique suggestiveness on the part of the artist, these paintings re-vitalize
the meaning of human condition by referencing its materiality. On the
other hand, the artist makes the world more connected through her
churning abstractionism and allows a timelessness and presentness
to intrude on notions of narrative and recording. Instead, fleeting
perceptions and sensations within the artist’s sensorium are tracked
and recorded through gesture and color, and through her uninhibited
applications of paint. The continuous, the untold and the irreducible is
what Gro Folkan has chosen to bring to light in her work. Her coloristically
saturated paintings are the surrogate psychic spaces that resonate with
our emotion-laded perceptions of a world both atomized and united in a

frenzy of space, speed and time. Within these surrogate spaces the artist
takes on an pictorial ride that is unforgettable: sailing between psychic
assimilation and social incoherence we take the measure of our worlds,
both inner and outer, through the artist’s intoxicating pictorial language.
Most compellingly, it refuses to hear itself speak through echoes,
preferring, instead, to reveal what the artist has termed ”air” between
the layers of mystical evocations and the beauty of the inner being.
John Austin is an art writer living and working in Manhattan
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