Untitled Document

Whatever you may know about the Abstract Expressionist movement, Thomas Henriksson also knows. And what he brings to the viewer is his own unique approach to the same old unsolved problem of painting. Conceptual closure is superfluous.
Thomas Henriksson in front of, BLACK CLOUD, 2007, Öl auf Leinwand, 190 x 320 cm

His works emerge from the act of joyous involvement with matter, from layers upon layers of reference until the subject is left bare and minimal, subordinate to the ruptures of paint alone. The works are left generously open but yet remain strangely personal.

Thomas Henriksson opens at Wilde Gallery on April 30th with “Clouds”, a show of large scale paintings from the “Weather Painting” series, addressing the experience, physicality and resistance of painting. In many ways, this show addresses the classical relationship between nature/culture and the constant challenge for artists to infuse meaning into works where there can perhaps only be room for experience. The painterly surface acts here as a translator of the simplest of conditions.
The “Weather Paintings” emerged from a particularly rainy past summer, which prompted a painterly response in the form of large scale canvasses that can evoke thoughts of ruptures of wind, climate changes, a melancholy silent rain or simply the backdrop and or excuse for the visceral application of paint.
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What we are faced with through these paintings is natures’ cycle, its’ retribution and restitution. There are no humans here to settle the score. What language the paintings may carry is kept at a minimum, almost to the point of vacancy. The larger issues of language and matter is left by the artist to be lost in translation, perhaps so that the viewer may experience a similar feeling of release to the powers that are rendered independently by nature.
As a viewer one is left with the memory of the artists’ performance, his physical wrestling with pushing matter around and bowing under the texture and thickness of paint itself. It is this physicality of painting itself that supersedes any language or formula that the artist may have thought of, that, at the end of the day, remains a refreshing thought that painting can still be a force of its own.