Lydia Ericsson Wärn
“Center”
New York, 11 East 78th Street
In Center, singular figures or partial bodies are revealed and concealed through Ericsson Wärn’s intuitive process. The group of new paintings’ use construction akin to throwing a clay vessel on a spinning wheel—pushing and pulling the slip until the mass has the capacity to hold. In gestural fields of paint which at times engulf each body, and signal a kind of burial or emergence.
Access to the figure is repeatedly denied, a hand is raised or back is turned, keeping the viewer at a distance. Figures are often partially clothed—in effect, emphasizing their nakedness. In Ruffle, we see a woman’s profile, her gray blouse disintegrating into the ashen field surrounding. Her hand is raised, concealing her face and any identifiable recognition. A gray swatch of paint veils her head further. In each subsequent layer of secrecy, the body dissolves into abstraction, reminding us of its painted materiality. Temperature takes the supine format of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521-1522—a woman lies on her back, her soot colored body contiguous with the cold ground beneath her. Shrouded in blue, her confinement is broken by the foot of another body, entering the picture plane on the right hand edge. Expanding on Holbein’s exploration of death as a sublime realm, the body remains the only constant, even as portions become submerged in paint. The embodied experience of change ends momentarily in death until it initiates a new chain reaction of transformations, be it biological or spiritual.
Ericsson Wärn often uses herself as model to make her paintings which actively work against portrayal. Using the artist's body but not as self portrait gives free reign in revealing, distorting or accurately resembling the human figure. The paintings are made alongside each other over time—a collective resurrection which challenges the formation of an individual identity and instead tests the body’s ability to refuse recognition
