It is important to stop painting when it is fun, because then the painting will be good, says Oskar Hult about his painting and points out that it is important that the intuition is interrupted in time while the energy remains. It is probably the energy that rubs off on the viewer. The presence and desire for painting.
I find it difficult to put into words Oskar's painting without getting entangled in metaphors. The paintings are mostly non-representational. There is so much here, but so little is told. I tend to fill in and talk about and around instead of describing exactly what I see. But this going around and around is part of painting, it kind of talks to itself at the same time as it addresses its surroundings. Each individual painting is its own imprint, but together they can be seen as a gigantic score.
In his investigative practice, Oskar has for a number of years playfully, and with great presence, investigated painting as a material fate of time. Introspection and reflection are mixed with intuitive decisions and impulsive outcomes. The palette is distinctive with muted earth colors that go hand in hand with bright colours. The brush shows itself with a covering color application that is often pastose. By, for example, cutting out the canvas from a painting in progress, in order to stick it on top of another in the next moment, Oskar works with layers of time and matter in an extremely concrete way. Humor alternates with dystopia, everyday observations meet complex existential reasoning. Faded memories of various sensations, coincidences and experiences are materialized through fragments that are brought together
Nature is a constant source of inspiration for Oskar. One painting is part of a branch, another a weather forecast, a third comments on Onkalo (a constructed cave, where nuclear waste will be stored for the future), a fourth ponders why the seasons seem to come as suddenly every year, a fifth is apparently a blueberry purple hangover.
In a time of important digital image destinies, Oskar's painted surfaces seem ruggedly present, even downright real. The paintings are stored with time and meaning, material sections of a time's destiny. Although they work excellently on the screen as digital substitutes, it is only in reality that the viewer is allowed to take in them in all their materiality. Unlike the digital image, the painting has physical traces of a previous activity. A time capsule that shows both what was and what is. The absent painter becomes palpably present in the painting, here and now.
Text by: Sigrid Sandström
Professor of liberal arts, Royal Academy of Arts