'Kria (View)’ is part of a suite of paintings of equal size divided into day and night, each inspired by the same source drawing. With a different format to the other paintings in the group, ‘Kria (View)’ is at once a continuation of and departure from Andreas Eriksson’s series. This work is created with oil, acrylic and tempera paint applied to un-primed canvas resulting in a rich, build-up of colour shades. Like the development of an analogue photograph, the painting appears to be slowly coming to the surface through a foreground of darkness.
‘Kria (View)’ reveals stark combinations of colour and texture. Thinly applied fields of paint sit alongside pronounced areas of thick impasto. Built up in fragments and rendered in a variety of loose and controlled applications of paint, this work contains elements of representation and abstraction and resembles both topographical maps and gestural forms. The countless, muted shades of grey sit alongside surprising washes of pink, or patches of vivid ochre, or unexpected seas of bright aquamarine.
In a critical text on the series Gilda Williams remarked that ‘Eriksson's large, abstract Kria works reveal themselves as an encyclopaedia of painterly possibility, like a sampler offering every species of brushstroke available. Marks might be short and thick, or thin, liquidy and long. Or imperceptible, resulting in 'brushless' solids of colour. Every stroke functions like a sort of pixel which, taken in voluminous combination, resolves overall to form a new kind of 21st-century painted landscape.’
Eriksson’s strength lies in his ability to elicit a palpable sense of texture and place, both in nature and his studio. By relying on serendipity and chance, the artist elicits new discoveries and opportunities in painting. As Williams concludes in her text: ‘The cave opening offered by the Kria composition becomes a kind of portal – a 'resonant void' – in which, for Eriksson, the limitless secrets of painting are promised.’
