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Essay
by Kukkamari Gröndahl

Staring at your drawings is like staring at pure meaning that words – or my words – would not be able to do justice to. I tried to write something and was struck by the fact that your drawings, while interposed with our world in the best of ways, are probably not something I should even write about, because they exist in their own unique world that is fully functional and harmonious and self-cognisant on their own. Your drawings are like a confrontation between the waking world of hard forms and society and constructs with that of dream and bliss, an aesthetic greatness grounded in your use of color and joy but rooted in a sincerity that makes it difficult to write about. It’s like describing pure meaning, or music – how on earth could a description make sense?

Looking at your drawings feels like staring into the opposite of a void and finding that everything means something. It’s like a metaphor for the chaotic potency of life – the transcendent perfection of the drawings arises not out of form or greatness or even excellence, but from joy and humor and a daring heart, and a vision and propensity for risk taking that makes them truly great. They invite the viewer to reimagine what greatness might be, as well as what every stroke might mean, because the inherent meaning is as powerful as the colors are inviting and warm, drawing the viewer into a world beyond shape and form, where color is a hidden language of the heart and vibrancy a sound; each stroke a master of wit, humor and humanity.

Each composition leaves one feeling richly optimistic and indebted to your vision, as if the supposed poignancy of our world is no match for all that lies between us all and underneath the surface and in between shapes and forms – a color composed of love and joy, simple and breathtaking and true. The colors are many layered, many tiered and wholesome, and thus hold a gravitas despite the inherent compositional lightness – like staring at mercury or marble or better, a floorboard covered with mica – and each stroke holds a self-congruency in its intoxicating wave-like power: daring, unselfconscious and potent but choreographed like nature itself, waves crashing upon rocks upon waves into all eternity, until something breaks down and the energy is transferred elsewhere, but untragically because the colors and meaning are actually imperishable, just like the essence that survives in myth.

Your drawings draw upon the subconscious realm but appear to work in tandem with it, not as its imposing master but not subjected to it either, but in an alluring harmony. Their intelligence grabs the viewer, because it is intelligence presented in a new way – reimagining what intelligence might be and what it might be for. Thus, they startle the viewer into comprehension, before drawing back into the mystery of dream and humor and leaving the viewer to marvel at the creation as a principle of creation itself. Everything is in relationship to everything else in the drawings, and it reminds the viewer that the same applies, albeit less obviously and sometimes less apparently beautifully, in life. And yet the viewer is left to surmise that perhaps this beauty that is so obviously and majestically revealed in your drawings is actually only a reminder of what is possible around us, if only we’re willing to see it and bring it out.

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