Karin Lind paints with a physical force. Sculpts painting with layer upon layer of paint. It feels like thin, black mud. Shiny red oil. Frozen oceans and snow piles that never melt. It’s moving, in both the direct and transmitted sense of the word.
My fingertips feel the structure of the brushstrokes even though I am not touching the paintings. The arduous redos, the calm applications and the quick ones. She’s been at it for three years, drawn to the peculiar and now she’s opening it up to us. We, the spectators, get to climb onto the scene, up on stage and in between the peaks, into open landscapes and nearby rooms where animals and strange beings roam. A human figure is hiking and reading as she walks. Her clothes billowing in the wind. Independent in a soil-saturated landscape.
A trunk-clad creature is whipping up foam. There, someone singing from a dark source. Another one is standing in the sea smoke pulling up a net, or perhaps saving someone unlucky from drowning. They are in the midst of a turbulent movement, but possess stillness at the same time. A swan head bunts the very mountain. And over there, an enormous trunk is spraying water like a fountain, no, on second thought, it’s a meltwater-jokk finding its way down the slope below the glacier.
The motifs affect us with their curious combination of something wild, obscure and painful with the silly, kooky and whimsical. Karin Lind has created extended rooms, which cannot be built, but can be accessed through searching. Her painting are emotional spaces of immediate conditions which takes me out to the place where we long to be.