Life affirming paintings

by Tom Jørgensen, editor of "Kunstavisen"

Annette Falk Lund fetches her inspiration from deep down in the undergrowth of the imagination. Her motifs echo deep within us, even when we cannot immediately come up with a firm interpretation. What we see is first and foremost the fairytale. All the stories about love, magic incantations, evil stepmothers, murderous uncles, noble knights, dragons and enchanted mirrors. All the ancient stories that Hans Christian Andersen, the Grimm Brothers and many others have retold. Stories that even in our high-tech era remain buried in our memories, to appear in our dreams or when the hard-pressed consciousness relaxes and for a moment allows the fantasy world of childhood to emerge large as life for us.

So we could describe the experience of looking at Annette Falk Lund's paintings as a liberation. The brain can be turned off and go exploring among the teeming chaos of people, colours and shapes, woven together into one big bubbling, exuberant narrative. After this instinctive pleasure, the brain steps in again to attempt to formulate a coherent story out of the chaos. The momentary annoyance we experience when we realise that no such unequivocal interpretation can be made is almost instantly woven up into the childlike delight we feel on looking at the pictures, and we are obliged to acknowledge that a deeper understanding is required of us. An understanding that is primitive and pre-linguistic, confirming the thesis that art is originally magical and enchanting.

In other words, Annette Falk Lund's art has roots in the same sources the German expressionists, the surrealists and the later COBRA artists cultivated: children's drawings, dreams and magical objects from what were once called primitive cultures. However, it is not the surrealists' or Asger Jorn's very masculine productions that most strongly influence Falk Lund. It is rather with artists like Marc Chagall, Gabriele Münter or the young figurative Kandinsky that she has something in common with. Artists who in a more gentle, poetic and dreamy way have created works that are profoundly inspired by folktales and Romanesque church art, as well as completely private factors.

Annette Falk Lund's way of working tells us much about her approach to art. The point of inception may be a desire to work with some specific colours, e.g. red, yellow and green, or a need to use specific motifs, often fetched from the immediate everyday or from the depths of her memory. A basic composition with two or three prevalent figures quickly reveals itself, and work proceeds from here in a mixture of completely spontaneous impulses and her deep-rooted knowledge of composition and chromatics. The difficult task is now to combine the freshness of spontaneity with the need for compositional clarity, and she often has to go through many overpaintings before the result feels right. In order to emphasise her sensual and creative approach to the painting, Annette Falk Lund often uses a very rough canvas, which gives composition a rustic, textural quality.

But when the objective is reached, we observers also have the opportunity to dip down into some absolutely life-affirming narratives, full of subtle humour and a bubbling appetite for life.