Pauline Fransson

Pauline Fransson´s paintings are often inspired by her immediate surroundings outside her studio in Nybro, Småland. She works mainly with eggtempera and oil on canvas and are interested in how fragility can be expressed through the transparency of the eggtempera and the opaque oils on the canvas. Pauline Fransson received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2021 and has in the last years exhibited in Sweden, Denmark and China.

Pauline Fransson (b. 1990, Sweden)

MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art 2021.

Lives ans works in Ateljéhus Pukeberg, Nybro, Sweden

Text by Nikolaj Stobbe, Vermillon Sands for Afgang 2021, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark

Pauline Fransson is a painter. Her series of works for the degree show were inspired by Fransson’s own immediate surroundings. We see, among other things, a stone, a tree, a jetty and a figure. There are no immediately striking aspects or distinctive traits to these places, things, or persons. We find ourselves near the artist’s studio in Småland, where each of the subjects have been carefully selected during her daily walks in the countryside. Small moments that may seem insignificant and trivial to some embed themselves as significant body memories in Fransson. She identifies a kinship between nature and the sensitive and impressionable body, expressed as a shared fragility. Nature is body and the body is nature.

Created by means of a special combination of egg tempera and oil paint, the images have a simultaneously saturated and transparent quality – both blurry and clear. But Fransson’s representations of embedded memories are underpinned by another layer: an exploration of how the medium of paint resists the artist, answering back. She sees no purpose in mastering the medium completely. Quite the contrary, Fransson embraces and acknowledges the inherent power and agency of the paint itself. In doing so, she contrasts the narrative conveyed by the landscape, the registering movement of her own body and its embedded memories of such movements with the chemical reactions in the paint and the joining of paint and canvas. To Fransson, the main subject of her art concerns the tensions between the body, nature and painting. The narrative presented in the depictions is less important; it is just the lure that entices us in to look at the picture. Up close, we can then observe the actual struggle between the artist’s registering and gesturing body, the material’s willingness and agency as it creates its own counter-narrative to that of the artist. An event that can only be fully unfolded when the audience move in front of the works, giving and receiving.