Carl Abrahamsson: Anna Camner: A colourful darkness

Anna Camner: Untitled, 2012. Oil on board.

In a world overflowing with conceptual emptiness and empty conceptualism, Anna Camner’s work brings us a well needed release and relief. Not merely because of her superior formal distinction but for the elaborate vision which is presented so convincingly within all her paintings.

Camner’s images are in many ways like macro-scopes of the soul, allowing a look inside just as much as outside. Her vegetative vistas of saturated life force resemble the old European masters and their memento moris and still lives. But life is never still in Camner’s regard, and neither are the images leaking with reminders of imminent death and oppressive religious philosophy. On the contrary, we are here thrown head first straight into the very essence of life – the will to live, to survive, the adaption to our surroundings and, not least, the remarkable and mysterious beauty which becomes the visible and sometimes violent expression of this ungraspable process.

The darkness of Camner’s world is colourful, muted yet glowing ethereally with this lustre of chlorophyllic life force. Freeze frames of miniscule sections become grand scale adventures, in which the microcosm poetically embodies the macro version. This is the quintessential human attempt at vision: focusing on something distinct in order to understand the grand totality.

Regardless of whether we can ever understand anything at all, a few solid givens constitute our human safety. One of these is beauty pure and simple, the one that doesn’t stick to the surface and even less to any mental or esthetic concepts. This beauty is so emotionally eloquent in Camner’s work that any attempts at referencing or even describing are completely futile and in vain. Suffice to say that her minisculistic grandeur reveals a sensitive mind preoccupied with revelatory detail. Combined with her extreme skill, the result can only be overwhelming insights into brief moments and cross-sections that are now already gone, passing, forever in flux.

Life moves on indefinitely. If we’re lucky we can perhaps catch a glimpse of something that’s magical and filled with existential resonance. Anna Camner helps us in this with her generous offerings of colourful darkness.