Abstract cuts
Emet Brulin
Much can be done with scissors and abstraction. Coloured fields and parallelograms
displacing each other, forming chains and arrows, expanding as they shrink. In
Katarina Löfström’s video work The Elements (2025), a simple image unravels into its
constituent parts. Her work is that of dismantling and reassembling. A backward step
from the order in which everyday perception lulls us. In other words, a way of
breaking down and understanding a taken-for-granted whole.
Löfström takes hold of, cuts, and purifies Karin Larsson’s tapestry The Four Elements
to its smallest geometric denominator. She, Karin, stands on the right in her
husband Carl Larsson’s painting Azalea (1906), body facing out and away from the
painting, neck bent diagonally backwards; hidden behind a large azalea, she looks
towards the painter. That is, towards you. Karin has scissors in her hand. On the left,
the everyday scene is interrupted by small rectangular and vertically wave-shaped
fields of colour in a loom – the beginning of the tapestry The Four Elements. An
opening, that is, in the canvas where the weave of perception can be unbraided.
Is some underlying truth reviled here? That is not the point. But by cutting and
refining, abstracting, removing from the order of perception, that which we do not
see that we see through, the continuous flow of perception is broken. Stories twist
around themselves and collapse. A kind of code emerges that belongs neither to
any scene with Karin Larsson, you or me at the kitchen table, nor to the primordial
sound or image of the nation. It is not a striving for resemblance to such a scene.
The code is this: to take apart and put together, and the utmost pleasure that comes
from abstracting and modulating the given. A reminder of the fact that what we
perceive is contingent.
Narcissus’ lament – I cannot escape – is a cry that testifies to the opposite: the given
is not contingent, not possible to change, take apart or to escape. The very image of
Narcissus is all too dear to him. Katarina Löfström lets the lament echo. Reinforces
and breaks down this dreadful lock into banal code. Dots and dashes. Long and
short flashes. A representation, yes, but above all a new expression that enables an
opening in the ego’s hermetic relationship with itself, the nation's romanticisation of
its sound. When the absurdity of the lock is formalised and taken to its extreme,
then one can only laugh at its banality. Such is the power of abstraction; the given is
not given.
Entering the gallery space and surrounding oneself with fields of colour on the walls
and floor and The Elements’ electronic sounds which contrasts with the fiddles is to
decipher abstraction for oneself and how it relates to everyday expressions. The
code points back to the viewers themselves – it is up to you, do with it what you can.
If Karin Larsson’s tapestry and Narcissus’ lament are puzzle pieces and emblems of
our time, Löfström offers an exercise: do not attach yourself to what perception
gives, accentuate the given detail and bring the reinforced element together with an
unexpected other. Taking apart requires more order, more systematics, than putting
together. Löfström’s room and work are thus a much-needed call to, with equal
parts playfulness and seriousness, find the openings in and modulate reality.
Emet Brulin is a critic and doctoral candidate in aesthetics.