"PAINTINGS/WATERCOLORS"

Like many Swedish artists in the post-World War II years, Lars Fredrikson completed his artistic training in France, taking courses at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, a private art school.

An admirer of Malevich and Kandinsky, he discovered Op art, Kinetic art, and Geometric Abstraction, and took an interest in the painter Auguste Herbin, who had recently developed an analogical catalogue of forms, musical notes, and colors.

Using these connections, throughout his career Lars Fredrikson displayed a mode of expression that brought him closer to gestural painting, founded on the notion of primordial movement. Fond of Zen philosophy and Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, Fredrikson was also very struck by the influence of Suprematism, the Russian movement led by Malevich in the late 1910s which explored the relationship to an original state of pure forms that echo another reality.

Like Kandinsky, who sought to reproduce the expressiveness of music, Lars Fredrikson tried to grasp the flow of energy through the body and capture it on canvas without seeking to imitate it.

Lars Fredrikson's canvases and watercolors have no center; developed using the allover model, they question the limits of their surface and the field of vision. The canvas is dotted with perforations and scratches, invoking a vibratory space that goes far beyond it.

Extract from the text "Paintings and watercolours" Catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Lars Fredrikson at the MAMAC in Nice, November 2019 (ed. MOUSSE PUBLISHING 2019, page 209)