Graziella Loyrette was in Karlstad and became overwhelmed when visiting Sandgrund, the artist Lars Lerin’s very own permanent art gallery.
Lars Lerin – För dig naken, 2016-2017, Aquarelle. Photo: Graziella Loyrette
I approach them to see how they are made. What did the process look like? Is it from a photo or from a real environment? Is it sketched, masked, painted in several layers? These are water color paintings, lots and large.
»How can all this be made by one person?«
»A lonely house, just like the one we have«, I overhear some visitors exchanging thoughts around the artworks.
Forests, empty spaces, boat yards. Light, darkness and reflections in a wide color spectrum are captured in several works almost magically through the free aquarelle technique. Bodies and humans are more difficult to catch with these pigments floating around freely in water. But I think I understand that it’s not the places in themselves that attract, maybe it’s the people who are there and what they do there that interest us? At least that’s what I fantasize around.
Lars Lerin – Sjöfart, 2015, Aquarelle. Photo: Graziella Loyrette
Homoerotic motifs are featured in the series För dig naken, 2016-2017, which could be profile pictures from Grindr and Sjöfart, 2015, with historical motifs of sailors added to the edges of the beautiful environmental images, the pictures remind me of motifs from the Fassbinder film Querelle. These are an important addition to the beautiful paintings that, to me, otherwise become quite uninteresting when the enthusiasm of the reinforced realism is over.
Lars Lerin – För dig naken, 2016-2017, Aquarelle. Photo: Graziella Loyrette
There is plenty of seating. It’s needed. This feels like a mix of us strolling around in a park or being in some kind of training facility to train us to digest a lot of pictures. Walking around among pictures in this way is something else than seeing them flick past in the flow of a screen, the materiality, the amount of work and the forces that made these images is so noticeable.
Aquarelle works by Lars Lerin at Sandgrund Konsthall. Photo: Graziella Loyrette
The amount of work is overwhelming. It never ends. I can not take in all this. And I do not think I want that anyway.
Influential Art Critic writing for Gallery Extra Magazine, Sun Times News and Gallery Extra TV.
