Dan Jönsson's presentation of Carin Blücher's body of work
2025
A bewildering world opens up in Carin Blücher's images. It is most reminiscent of the one seen in portraits from old-time photo studios, where finely dressed, serious people are silhouetted against backdrops that could represent, for example, an exotic landscape, a castle park or perhaps an aristocratic salon environment. Blücher's models seem similarly posed in a room that is fundamentally alien to them, an illusory two-dimensionality that three-dimensional bodies try to adapt to as best they can. It looks uncomfortable and unnatural, but with the help of the camera they are ultimately forced into its flat reality. A room that lacks depth, which is therefore not a room. What is it then?
When we use terms like “picture space” or “painterly space”, what we are actually describing is something other than a room, in the usual sense. But what? The figures in Carin Blücher's staged photographs explore this ambiguous and contradictory state, which is at once illusion and reality. They are guests in the world of color and form where the dimension of depth is something that can only be accessed with the help of shading, color contrasts and other kinds of illusions, and they seem to move in accordance with its natural laws, following the plan of the scenery and the painterly objects as best they can. Trying to fit in, but remaining relentlessly fundamentally alien to its limitations.
Yet it is these limitations that they seem to be drawn to. And for precisely the same reason that people have always engaged in painting, and art in general – to understand their place in the world. In her essay The Art of the Impossible, the Danish author Solvej Balle has attempted to explain the origin of art and its classic genres from an anthropological perspective, namely as a way of doing precisely “the impossible” and transcending the fundamental conditions that limit our understanding of the world. In painting, by giving the illusion of a world without a “back” and allowing us to survey the vast space we are surrounded by. In sculpture, by bridging the material difference between man and his surroundings. In music, by filling in the infinite void we are surrounded by. And so on: the works of art function as a kind of “state of exception” in which the impossible – experiencing the world in its objective fullness – becomes possible for the moment.
If there is anything to such an interpretation, Carin Blücher’s stagings can be seen as a kind of short-circuiting of these exceptional experiences. Their ambivalent spatialities have an important model in an interior by Pierre Bonnard, one of the post-impressionist painters who, in partly the same spirit, consciously flattens his motifs to emphasize their artificial superficiality. Bonnard's method of using color as both space-building and space-dissolving at the same time, his way of constructing his interiors in shallow planes that superimpose each other in layers with sometimes puzzling effects – what should be in the background often appears to be quite close, and vice versa – echoes in Blücher's playful use of painted objects as both tools and obstacles for her models' flatness exercises. A vase, a drape, a parasol, a gate become props in an existential theater where the drama arises entirely in the breaks in illusion caused by the human figures' helpless physicality. In the world of the image they remain strangers, trapped in an impossible situation that stops every movement in depth. They know, as the saying goes, neither in nor out.
Dan Jönsson, author and art critic (originally written in Swedish and then translated)
Audio Recordings
Texts in English
Texts in Swedish
Dan Jönsson presentation av konstnärsskap, 2025
Samtal mellan Mette Hansen och Carin Blücher, 2022
Carolina Söderholm, Recension, 2022
Kristina Maria Mezei, Omkonst.se
Olle Niklassson, Recension, 2020
Carolina Söderholm, Recension, 2018
Johanna Gredfors Ottesen, Recension, 2018
Gertrud Sandqvist, Katalogtext, 2018
På annan plats, Utställningskatalog, Ystads Konstmuseum, Redaktör Nils Magnus Sköld, 2017
Thomas Millroth, Katalogtext, 2014
Carolina Söderholm, Recension, 2013
Cristina Karlstam, Recension, 2010
Gabriella Ioannides, Intervju, 2009
Carolina Söderholm, Recension, 2007
Britte Montigny, Recension, Skånska Dagbladet, 2007/09/14
Jutta Kübler Boström, Recension, Värmlands Folkblad, 2007/05/14
Conny CA Malmqvist, Recension, Kvällsposten, 2006/09/24
Carolina Söderholm, Recension, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 2005/01/13
Patric Moreau, Recension, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 2005/05/08
Conny CA Malmqvist, Recension, Kvällsposten, 2005/05/07
Gunilla Gran-Hinnfors, Recension, 2002
Gunilla Gran-Hinnfors, Recension, Göteborgs-Posten, 1998/11/19