Tom Cullberg’s ‘Finding New Life in an Old Form’ sees the artist breaking new ground in the balance between abstraction and representation and between narrative and painterliness. It is as if each canvas is a slice through time, a calculus of forms if you like, and the viewer is presented with an exquisite moment of tension that refers obliquely to something that has passed whilst offering a glimpse of what is to come.
The backgrounds of these works are, for the most part, abstract and expressionistic tours de force: deft, almost calligraphic swathes of paint surmounting a deeper level of color and form. But breaking through this abstraction and surmounting it are moments of realism: faces; quotidian objects; printed matter; architectural structures and landscape. If one looks carefully however, it also appears from time to time as if the realism is the base and the abstraction is what is overpowering and encumbering the realism.
