A survey of visual languages.
The career of the artist Alvar Gullichsen (b. 1961) follows a clear line. From having explored the visual languages of our surroundings, he has moved on to investigate the visual language of the inner soul experience. Although Gullichsen has worked enthusiastically in cooperative groups, such as The Bonk Business Inc. project and ROR (Revolutions on Request), his painting has always been an extremely private process that reveals the true course of his development as an artist. His complete artistic control over the interplay between thought, eye, hand and medium has given us an insight into the process of imagination.
Gullichsen is also a skilled percussionist. This talent may seem irrelevant in terms of painting, but rhythm has always been an important dynamic element in all his paintings. A longer stay in Benin in Africa in 2002 as a scholarship holder in the artist center Villa Karo changed the direction of both his painting and his music. He has gone from an imaginative handling of common visual and auditory languages to searching for and revealing a uniquely personal and even unfathomable spiritual visual language.
Man has been trying to describe the magic of experience for tens of thousands of years, ever since the first meaningful signs were made on cave walls and tools. Now in the urbanized 21st century, we are completely surrounded by a myriad of symbols of consumption and entertainment. We no longer create our own significant magical markers, but they are made for us by large corporations.
Gullichsen's development as a painter began with the unartistic joy born of imagination and then moved with sure steps to an understanding of imagination as a deep process. He tries to convey the mystery and magic of what lies beyond the limits of what can be perceived with the senses or reason by enticing the viewers to find out what meaning his works have for them personally, not the personal meaning they have for him.
Richard Stanley