A vocation therefore. The industrial designer had his own “Road to Damascus“, his own moment of truth. And while not religious as in the case of Paul, whom God struck blind in Syria and who left behind the Saul in himself and thus, without being asked, was thrust into a visionary’s life with a certain end, it has for Karlsen, too, certainly been a path away from the weight of materiality. This is, moreover, a general characteristic of Karlsen’s work, found not only in his paintings but in his sculptures as well. In keeping with the physical characteristics of bronze, brass, stainless steel and co., his sculptures are often quite heavy. Yet they seek to convey how form can overcome heaviness, to capture the contrast between material weight and the lightness of form. This will be discussed in greater detail in the text about Karlsen’s sculptures; we shall concentrate on the figurativeness of his paintings here.

When we study these intense canvases, when we behold and question them, we find certain things that definitely evoke figures: we imagine we see mountains hovering over expanses of paint, flower-like forms, architectural structures created out of flakes of paint, experimental orders that resemble starting points for a ritual practice of paint ... and or also – in just one case – something like a finely woven, perfectly pointed “crown of thorns” beneath which, once we have noticed the crown, we immediately see the face of a suffering person emerging from the paint, with the line of a shoulder below it.

Yet none of these elements refer to the living weight of that which they evoke. These mountains fashioned from strata of paint hover like birds’ wings, like veils, up on high. These are distant, shining washdays of the sublime. The flowers are patterns, rhythmical anagrams of a vegetative yearning for light, borrowed from a nature experienced in dreams. The architectural structures are erected out of the vibrant aerial substance of paint.

So figurativeness is everything here, just not the point of departure or the end. Its function could be compared with the significance a landscape has for the chasing clouds above it: its topography influence the clouds’ movement and shapes but does not determine the quintessence of a cloud or its power to give a landscape the rain that enables it to bloom.

What we see here as the formative matrix of the images is an initially mental and kaleidoscopic presence of forms and structures. These are inner patterns that the artist senses on the canvas as he is working and that he simultaneously transforms and realises in the act of painting. There is something clairvoyant in this metamorphosis: the future of form becomes its present in the painting. The painting’s structures unfold like silent sounds, recorded by the deaf-mute microphone of the brush, respectfully “seen” in their cloudlike attire.

Who creates form here? Form works through the hand of the painter who perceives it, as if coming up to the light by its own power. And that process is an important element of this art: we imagine we see forms, circles, expanses, strata that shift, densify and move concentrically before our eyes, dancing like bubbles. Karlsen’s perception, hands and eyes set the stage for premières of the soul, which follow the libretto of paint and the finely tuned music of the painter’s heart. Crystalline meteorologies of the innermost depths open up to us here.

Time and again we find underlying strata and bands that are answered by pointed calligraphic forms on the surface. In front of the contours of mythical, dreamlike castles, we see concealing veils that dissolve, evoke and transform that which was once archetypal form into flowing painting.

We sense Karlsen’s intense enthusiasm for the idea of representing the absurd conception of time, whose past strata – even if they cannot be seen through the more recent ones – can at least be “made visible” by painting, as Paul Klee, the master of combining the crystalline and the organic, once put it.

We see cosmogonies in oil. Creations of the world on a canvas measuring 60 x 60 cm, sheltered from the scrutiny of NASA, following only the ultimate achievements of the visual, the eyes, which identify that which they see as the only thing that has substance: the imaginary.

To sum up, Karlsen’s painting is not figurative but it is thematic. Its themes arise from that remarkable combination of structures registered by the mind and flowing paint that we call painting. For any artist who concerns himself with the characteristics of painting, who studies paint, also studies the possibility of creating a more real world of art alongside the “real” world – and vice versa.

Yet the thing that really counts with such art is to look at it and to do so time and again. It is to witness the metamorphosis into form of that which the artist sees and senses, to experience its transformation into a pictorial existence

Dr. Philippe Büttner (Fondation Beyeler)