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TRANSIT 

Installation Lund Cathedral 2012     

The title of the installation – Transit – can refer to passage, where one emphasizes art as a place for change and going beyond. In it´s composition the exhibition transcended borders in terms of material and technology where oil paintings was integrated with Black light.

The crypt itself is a place of transition. Throughout history, many people have walked through the crypt. The decorated well gives us reason to believe that christenings were performed here. The grave slabs remind us of death as a boundary and as a gateway to another existence. If the cathedral is the body, then the crypt is its heart, its inner room. It is darker here and it takes a while for ones eyes to adjust, when coming down from the lighter aisles of the church above. We are invited to stop a while and wait for the interplay of eye, light and stone. Wandering between the columns has a rhythm all of its own.
   Dahlén experiments with colours as the carrier of light and they seem to hover in the air with lightness meeting the weight of the stone. The artist paints with light just as the architects interplay with light in order to build the room. (...)

    Erika Dahlén is interested in an artwork's origin. She examines how the work emerges and comes into being. The work continues to be created in an interaction with the observer, space and light.

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Lena Sjöstrand, Cathedral Chaplain

" [...] The wiping cloth in the painter's hand is of the sort which must eventually get stained, haphazardly. The cloth takes part in the process, an initiated recipient of actions and decisions, impulses and considerations, perhaps even momentary breakdowns. The white fabric receives without resistance. It makes no demands on its own handling, has no opinions or demands of aesthetic order and execution. Whatever happens happens as it does when a form occurs on its own without supervision. Meanwhile the artist is busy depicting her own form against a light or dark background.

  But when the cloth unfolds an image free from aim and purpose appears through its creases ("Trasa II/Cloth II"). It was not upon this humble piece of cloth that the intended – the painting, the work of art – was meant to appear. And yet it happened. In the moment where the painter becomes aware of how the assistant, the cloth, bears witness to a new act that encompasses them both, and subsequently lets the image of the cloth manifest itself on a canvas, a new metaphor with its own potential meaning emerges.
  The origination of paint on material, a quiet visual miracle bearing equal radiance to the magical painting ("Painting I"), whose pulsating sky blue surface captures the gaze of the spectator and reminds us that colour is a wonder of light that breaks sevenfold in movement and direction."

Nina Weibull, Ph.D., Senior Curator, The Art Collections, Stockholm University, Editor of Divan - Journal of Psychoanalysis and Culture

Translation: Katja Larsson

Photo: Anna Kallberg

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