Page 43 - TOP 10 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS - Volume II

Within the Layers:
Paintings of Gro Folkan, By John Austin

The dynamic paintings of Gro Folkan reflect the artist’s efforts The compelling contradiction sensed as the works’ clearly
to explore the pictorial language of evolution of female body organized frenzy demonstrates the painter’s exceedingly
and its movement within time through the activity of art suave commitment to the essence of art, what Irving Sandler

making. For the artist the process expresses her most private has defined as “The …way of heightening safety feeling…
moments in which she attempts to articulate her sense of through the modification and control of perception.” Folkan’s
self as a medium between the forces, both personal and paintings can be perceived as filled with a type of mystifying
transpersonal. enigma that bears close scrutiny.

Folkan does this with enormous assurance and vitality. Hovering between being completely non-representational
Not surprisingly, in her notes she writes: “My pictures are yet retaining a residual figural impulse in which bodies and
instruments, like runes for thousands of years by Northern their movements are referenced by an obligingly oblique

peoples to invoke hidden aspects of reality. The real pictures, suggestiveness as the part of the artist, these paintings
the images are not the lines and colors on my canvases, but revitalized the meaning of human condition by referencing
the images coming into being in the mind of the onlooker.” its materiality. On the other hand, the artist makes the word
more connected through her churning abstractionism and

Keeping these remarkable words in mind, it becomes clear allows a timelessness and presentness to intrude on notions
that the aesthetic dimensions in the Folkan’s work incorporate of narrative and recording. Instead, fleeting perceptions
a certain amount of figural and abstract expressionism. The and sensations within the artist’s sensorium are tracked
artist’s moving paintings fulfill one of the most important and recorded through gestures and color, and through her

functions of the artistic experience, namely to arrange uninhibited applications of paint.
sensations in such a way so that they, in Roger Fry’s words
“arouse in us deep emotions, through which this feeling of The continuous, the untold and the irreducible is what
a special tie with the man who expressed them becomes Gro Fokan has chosen to bring to light in her work. Her

very strong.” coloristically saturated paintings are the surrogate psych
spaces that resonate with our emotion-laded perceptions of

The best visual work says the inexpressible using forms a world both atomized and united in a frenzy of space, speed
and colors. Indeed, art is the paramount language of the and time. Within these surrogate spaces the artist takes on

unsayable in which, as Theodor Adorno claims, it is seen a pictorial ride that is unforgettable: sailing between psychic
as dialectic between the intuition and rationality, [as it] assimilation and social incoherence we take the measure
“attempts …to approximate thing and expression so closely of our worlds, both inner and outer, through the artist’s
that difference disappears.” In the Gro Folkan’s paintings the intoxicating pictorial language. Most compellingly, it refuses

sense of confidence is mixed with an element of pure, urgent to hear itself speak through echoes, preferring, instead, to
sagacity in spite of the aesthetic rowdiness with which the reveal what the artist has termed “air” between the layers
eye is initially confronted. 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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