Yvonne Larsson

Art critic Caroline Söderholm writes about the series 'Duvlek' in Kristianstadsbladet in connection with the 2012 exhibition in Kristianstad Konsthall:

"In contrast to the darkness of the forest suite, they appear almost blinding in their whiteness, like overexposed photographs. Perhaps not quite as distinctive in their expression as the forest images, they are nonetheless captivating. In a light that has erased all details, two children can be seen in a garden. The doves have settled closely on their shoulders, and the atmosphere shifts between sunny playfulness and uncertainty.

Like Maria Miesenberger’s acclaimed and unsettling Sverige/Schweden project—shown at Kristianstad’s art hall in 2010—she also takes the family album as a starting point, but only to dissolve the sharpness of the photograph’s exact reproduction. Instead, the children's figures break up into a coarse-grained black-and-white grid, as if to emphasize the ambivalence of memory and the fleeting moment.

At times, I think of Yvonne Larsson’s painting as an incantation. An attempt to keep memories, landscapes, forests—life itself—in check. Hence the fascination with the systematic patterns of the interiors in rugs, urns, and furniture, which suddenly break against white emptiness or impenetrable darkness.

She constantly returns to her motifs, as if the very repetition made it possible to revisit the moment.

A chance, through painting, to penetrate deeper into the essence of the subject—only to realize, in the next moment, the deception of this illusion. Then the painting itself becomes the essential thing, the source of meaning."