With oil pastels and dry pastels, Carlén is able to build up plastic and tactile visual worlds that convey fragmentary and dreamlike motifs. They are the artist’s memories and they appear as if they were saturated with nostalgic color.
Tones shift; cool meets warm, hard meets soft and light meets dark.
A Fauvist chiaroscuro. The color fields vibrate, rise and fall, pulsating. A thermal shock is foreshadowed, but it never bursts. It becomes a powerful and contrast-intensive painting that, rather than engulfing the viewer, extends out and over them in a perceptive embrace.
The sun glows and the air trembles. The light shines between the branches and the pine crowns corrode. Sharp black contours fetter the shapes in the fragmentary sections and the snapshots
gain eternal life. The suite begins with a fiery red room, and against the table rests a green figure with his hand over his face, lost in a contemplative state – or drained frustration.
The feeling is paradoxical; still and restless. Tickling, itchy, touching, disturbing. It is not about depiction, but about mood; not about objective vision but about the subjective.
The color has freed itself from its naturalistic duty and instead serves as temperament.
The green does not want to be skin, it wants to get under it. It is a painting that depicts the nuances of the atmosphere rather than the impression of things – l’impression – the impression of the moment; the changes of the day, the changes of the weather, movements and moods.
The fleeting is immortalized with both wild spontaneity and sharp precision.
Carlén’s pictorial world spans the trivial and the imaginative, balancing the real with the naive. It is intuitive and intense, charged and passionate. The narrative nature of the suite is anchored by towering pine trees. The viewer follows an existence, a gathered family, a solitary figure, and the quiet testimony of the surroundings about the promises of the day. There is rushing tenderness, youthful boredom, intense joy, and observant glances – inward and outward – and curious contemplation of the progress of existence. The image motifs can unfold over the course of a day – or an entire lifetime.
The sun sets and the flames fade beyond the horizon. The cool glow creeps into the treetops. The gaze sharpens like cat’s eyes in the darkness. Shadows dance between the trunks and the pines rise. The water sparkles white against the burning sky, the light shifts – and day turns to night, hot to cold, only to start again after the Aurora.
Martin Liljekvist
