Introduction: Marie Søndergaard Lolk

It is hard to say where the two hyperboles begin; the one of the too sharp eye, and the other of the landscape that sees itself confusedly under the heavy lids of its stagnant water.
– Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space

Marie Søndergaard Lolk’s works are based on a rematerialization of the medium of painting through various processes and techniques. This rematerialization effects a slowing down of our normal visual reading and – at the same time – an opening towards a kind of microperception of things as they exist prior to their identification in more general categories. Content and expression are brought into a more literal clash as when for example curving field tracks are painted on a door mat woven in a spiral shaped pattern. In the recent text-based paintings word-images are transformed into ornamental structures where the disappearance of conventional semantic meaning allows for another perception of the now abstract words as actions and movements. The acrylic paint are reinvented in the paintings as plastic substance and layered material following the law of gravity just like any other object. In the smaller pixed-based paintings it is paint itself that literally holds the painting surface together, which in these cases are assembled of small strips of wood. Lolk’s paintings differ a lot from each other, they are hermetic, abject, blunt, amorphic, blurred, precise, and other things as well. Many of the new works relate to landscapes.