The hybrid digital oil paintings of the freeways brought me to the underpinnings of train tracks where I became lost in the timbers as if I was in a forest.
These paintings are the closest I ever got to abstract painting.
Here is the abridged essay from friend and scholar, Dr. Ricardo de Mambro Santos, about these works:
In her recent paintings, Kristina Hagman brings forth, with great vigor and surprising coherence, the intention of mooring “eloquent structures” to representational painting, by using the methods offered in “combined painting.” Underneath their more immediate mimetic appearance these same structures are able to go beyond their own figurative roots, to attain a refined compositional recodification. The result is an image of limits, balanced between a great iconic force and an outstanding tendency toward abstraction, or more simply, toward a selection of de-iconized forms. Hagman maintains a continuous dialog between photographic matrices, which form the basis of her works, and the successive moments of their re-elaboration. In doing so, she subtracts the point of departure from the usual semantic definitions. Thus, a bridge, an architectural fragment, any detail taken from the urban landscape, is no longer seen as a figurative object; instead, it is translated into the contrary, as impressions of something much more subtle, profound – dense in their pictorial functions but, at the same time, present in Hagman’s ultimately delicate landscapes. These are hidden structures; they would be, unseen, without the touch of the artist. Hers is a hand that is able to transform the dominion of the visible into a stimulating laboratory of seeing.
In this sense, the pictorial space Kristina creates is not meant to offer the spectator a return to the reality nearby, which would be grounded in an iconographic soil. It captured the urban forest, behind the banality of the already seen where the spectator can discover a vision always ready to go farther.
Form becomes structure. Structures become rhythm. On the one hand, these works tend to bring about a choice, a conscious sublimation of things already seen in the sphere of circumstance, which are quickly realized in the camera’s eye; they are then constantly brought into the dynamic reiteration, the morphologic repetition characteristic of many abstract languages, starting with Piet Mondrian and leading all the way to the masters of Neoconstructivism. In this case, Hagman’s structures come to us in the infinity of grid lines which are repeated, which strike one another, and which multiply ceaselessly. On the other hand, the dense and physical brushstrokes of the artist, full of the memory of their nearby figurative origins, show themselves on these same abstract and rhythmical passages. Between the infinity of form and the immediacy of luminous landscape, the works of Kristina Hagman depart from the serial arrangement of a pure abstraction and from the anonymity of mere reproduction, to become “eloquent structures” of a fascinating esthetic intuition: the intuition of the invisible at the edge of boundless vision of the everyday.
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