Lars Lerin

The watercolours of Lars Lerin, with their masterly intimations of obscurity, resemble some invocation. His work is an endless repetition of the same theme. His pictures etch themselves upon the memory, though they contain no exceptional features. The viewer’s gaze wanders across detail after detail: the facades of buildings, trunks of birch trees, patches of snow, abandoned farmyards and industrial towns. The cool of the Lofoten Islands and the heat of India. The Värmland forests of his childhood and the unexplored stretches of Iran. The nearby and the distant share the same space. Lerin travels the world but his foreign visits imply only one more homecoming. The true distance is that between the anonymous, faceless figures who people the Lerin landscape. His pictures give body to sensations rather than depicting the real world. The work of Lars Lerin has been published in some fifty books with his own texts and works of art.