Frozen Orbit

Opening: Thursday 23 August, 5-8pm
Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 11am–5pm. Saturday – Sunday 12pm–4pm.

Frozen Orbit is a series of eleven paintings executed between 2012 and 2017. The whole series shows a time sequence of eleven minutes, where each painting marks one minute. 4:01 a.m., 4:02 a.m. ... in a state of mind between dream and consciousness.

Each image defines its own territory while simultaneously reflecting the series in its entirety. Common to all the paintings is the interplay of correspondences between a frosty landscape and remnants of architecture; a recurring sky and passing clouds– sceneries that are interlinked by seemingly random parallels and idiosyncratic symmetries. White moon/black moon, exterior/interior, awakening/sleep.

Henrik Samuelsson, Frozen Orbit 4:08 a.m., 2014 - 2017

The shades of color in Frozen Orbit are reduced to four tones. A subdued white refers to the physically tangible world; a clearer white, brilliant and ethereal, to the atmosphere and the moon; a bluish tone where a bright light evokes the textures of the surface; and finally, a black tone with the falling darkness dissolving what was just recently revealed in the light and merging new visions.

Like a distant echo of Stega, an earlier series of paintings of the same format and number, Frozen Orbit also refers to the northern landscape in which the artist grew up. Here are places rendered in different stages of desolation and decay, views of silent vigilance and observation. A nature scenario, once wild and present, now haunted by mythologized specters.