Page 27 - recent works

scene in a film. The eye sweeps across the room whose walls are entirely
filled with paintings. In recent years large video projections of swirling
masses of water have also been incorporated into her exhibitions, leading
us directly into the unrestrained eye of the storm with seas that shut out
what is irrelevant.
But being surrounded in this manner does not entail a merely painterly
and sonic embrace. There is also something creepy and unpleasant in the
room evoking the moods in films by Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman.
Both directors use a psychological language that Ann Frössén relates to her
own life and to the dark character of her art.
As a little girl, she would sit unobserved in the darkness of the staircase
at the family home and watch the Hitchcock films being shown on TV – the
set newly purchased in connection with the introduction of TV-broadcasting
in Sweden in 1956. Ann Frössén remembers images that swept past: slippery
steps, rain and thunderstorms and, not least, the destructive confusion that
arises when people fundamentally misunderstand each other. This was an
atmosphere that she could recognize from her own experience. The grey scale
and the ominous sweeps of the camera in these films are something that can
be noticed as a subdued basic cord into her own art.

In Ann Frössén’s painting the surface movements of the waves are shown
with no chance of immediate escape; not even the merest tongue of
land in sight. The dangers of life are portrayed and with neither lifeline or
safety net we face the precipitous and menacing chasms. There is no room
for sunny beaches. On the contrary, we are led into fear and a sense of
abandonment. Only thus, she seems to be saying, do we attain knowledge of
self.
Owing perhaps to a lack of imagination we look for a focus somewhere in
the middle of the paintings, a place on which to fix our attention. But the very
visible break between two waves is often to be found in a sunlit, diagonal
movement towards the upper corner of the painting. We are constantly
presented with new pictorial solutions and perspectives in what seems to
be the same thundering sea.
Some canvases seem almost ethereal, with classically elegant details like
fine, embroidered lace. But after viewing them for a while, everlarger breaches
become apparent in these strange seascapes. Steep, rocky formations, wild
tree-tops and tender creeping plants covered in hoar-frost or dried salt appear
like mirages in the painting Everywhere.
At times, as in her painting The Branch, the incoming waves transport a
solitary branch that is aimlessly tossed on the tops of the waves: forwards,

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