Exploring visual languages

There is a clear arc in the career of artist Alvar Gullichsen (b. 1961). From an exploration of the visual languages of our environment, he has moved to the visual language of the internal spiritual experience. While Gullichsen has worked enthusiastically in cooperative groups such as The Bonk Business Inc. project and ROR (Revolutions on Request), his painting has aways been an intensely private process that reveals the true course of his evolution as an artist. His total painterly control of the interaction between mind, eye, hand and medium has also allowed us to peek into the process of imagination.

Gullichsen is also a skilled percussionist. Such a talent may seem irrelevant to painting, but rhythm has been an important dynamic in all his paintings. A long stay in Benin, Africa in 2002, on a scholarship at the Villa Karo cultural centre, changed both the direction of his painting and his music. He has moved from the imaginative manipulation of shared visual/aural languages to a quest to reveal a uniquely personal and even ungraspable spiritual visual language.

Depiction of the magic of experience has been with us for tens of thousands of years, since the first meaningful marks were made on cave walls and tools. Here in the urban 3rd millennium, we are surrounded on all sides by the myriad symbols of consumption and entertainment. We no longer make our own meaningful magic marks, they are provided to us by corporations.

Gullichsen’s evolution as a painter began with the simple joy of imagination, moving confidently to an understanding of imagination as a deep process. He seeks to convey the mystery and magic of transcendence by beguiling the observer into finding their own personal meaning in his work, not the personal meaning it has for him.

Richard Stanley

This item is collected at Iso Roobertinkatu 12 Helsinki after the auction has ended​.