Håkan Karvonen
Artist-statement
In my artistic practice, I work with figurative painting that explores the legacy of modernism, focusing on aspects such as perspective, illusion, symbolism, space, and abstraction. I choose a concept rooted in one of these aspects and begin with image research. The motifs are selected based on the concept but are ultimately cropped to contribute to a visual experience for the viewer, using painting as a visual portal between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional worlds. One of my mottos is to question how painting relates to the fact that it is part of the space, thereby raising questions about the relevance of painting in today's art climate.
The installation of the paintings is carried out in dialogue with the architectural qualities of the space to connect the dimensions, thus opening a channel between the painted world and the viewer's. To gently guide the viewer into a frictionless oscillation between dimensions, I work serially and use a consistent color palette as a foundation. This helps maintain the illusion of the painted world as an autonomous place.