Houses become monuments in Carina Fogdes paintings
The houses that Fogde constructs with her paintbrush and colours have a powerful symbolic charge that to some extent diverges from the conventional understanding of what the house represent. Remote from the urban enviroment, these houses are transformed into solitary monuments of humanity that have become rooted in the earth, although they do not really belong here. Without doors, these houses lock everything, inside and outside of themselves. Instead of being the nesting places of people, they become nature urban ornamentation. Fogdes restrained detail is balanced by her rich choice of colours. Yellows, red, oranges, greens and blues shimmer on the canvas.
"The colours recall the romantic tradition followed by the Göteborg Colourists in the early 1900s. The Colourists artistic motto can be captured in the words of Ivan Ivarsson: To paint is above all to make poetry of colour does not play the primary role then work may constitute art but not painting."
This nearly century-old tradition is loyally perpetuated by Fogdés paintings although she also pursues her own aesthetic expression. The intense palette she uses constrasts sharpy with the simple, consise shapes. The poetry on these canvasses may be read in many ways. The naked houses without entrances give a feeling of isolation that is countered by the fresh, vivid and enticing colours. The poem that speaks to me from these canvasses is about an eternal dialectic
-between knowing that isolation is hell and the certainty that it is also the gateway to heaven.
Joanna Persman, Göteborgs Posten, Newspaper in Gothenburg, Sweden
