Karl Fröman’s From Chaos We Are Borne is a dive into a questionable realm in the arts – something akin to blending the new with the old. We can call the style of the artworks as realism to some extent, with elements of abstract expressionism.

This duality was created with the assistance of the artist’s young daughter, whose underpaintings allow for the art to almost haphazardly develop without direction and let it be followed by the painter into the direction of some important philosophical thoughts in turn portrayed figuratively.

Using a predominantly traditional oil medium with only a small addition of silver flakes, these works echo a classical training shaken up with a modicum of anarchy. We get to see and feel the duality experienced by the artist and his two-year-old assistant throughout the exhibition in one very explosive and exciting eclectic mix.

Karl Fröman

Titles like It’s all about the love we forgot to show explore not only our interpersonal relationships but our relationships to reality in general, the way we often become cemented into blindness by how unpredictability forges our outlook. Purposely painted with what could easily be misinterpreted as the ‘wrong’ colours makes this piece and all the works poly-equivocal to some extent, as each painting is honestly executed physically with the metaphysical content in mind. To look for and enjoy all and even conflicting points of view.

Myopic anima and Breathe speak directly to the viewer to say that there are always two sides to the coin, where our artist is often caught saying “hide the Easter eggs” an anecdotal way of asking us to look around for the deeper meaning and still display pleasantries on the surface.

Intuition

Other works toy with ideas of intellectual superiority, or rather the pompous existential solipsism levied against others, Cosmic Debris and Bigger than... playfully beg the question; are we actually smarter or bigger than anything in our world?

While other works take a much more humble soft angle and allow the viewer to enjoy a sparkling display of colours and figures for a visual aesthetic journey targeting a kind of solace, a peace of mind, through textures and colour balance. A carefully rendered figure in the work Symphony gives an air of carpe diem as a collective sentiment, striving for moments of togetherness in an empty void of questioning.

From chaos we are borne 3

The triptych From chaos we are borne explains perfectly the direction the artist took from abstract to a portrait of mother goddess Kali, staring back at us, like the mirroring a child expresses as part of the development into a self-conscious individual.

These works viewed one by one in succession in either direction do create a lineage of progression. In such a locality their full emotional influence can lovingly be viewed as a theatrical piece or a singular statement. Curated wonderfully by Melanie Erixon and her team at il-Kamra ta’ Fuq, this particular show does effectively pull us into an imaginary world when one can feel the duality as a cycle, non-being and being, becoming non-becoming in a way Camus may have enjoyed yet still seems to hold the reins somehow away from the completely absurd.

Art fostered language which in turn gave birth to everything that is the human experience- Karl Fröman

Where does the story begin and end? What is first? What is last? Tickling ideas of entropic beginnings and chaotic endings or vice versa. What for the artists in general? Is it all absurdist? We see depictions of intuition as a driving force, a conviction of a vocation stronger than that of pure reason.

It's all about the love we forgot to show

Are we looking at some kind of Kantian notion of three-fold synthesis as explained by Ginsborg? I doubt it could be applied insofar as the whole exhibition truly is a question including determination in execution from so many angles, texture, approach to subject, irony, subjectivity, and spontaneity, still contrived by control. Even the titled pieces give few answers and are just as ambitious as ambiguous in trying to convey a message to an audience.

The artist explains: “If art is only purely decorative it has a value but there, the surface, that feels like we limited ourselves. Art fostered language which in turn gave birth to everything that is the human experience. As the subject has been part of each and every epoch in different forms it somehow carries all human enterprise with it, now all the way to astro and quantum physics, even AI.

Serendipity

“Why then not let it embrace it all from Da Vinci to Pollock and well…to us now? I didn’t want to do something anywhere beyond what felt certain to me, but I liked the idea of uncertainty, so I went with it and let myself follow the mess on each canvas into thoughts on existence, entropy and discord. Life, the universe, and everything. I can’t help but feel our roles, the artists, are plagued by confusion; a long stumble through all the immense changes we try to endure are so well summed up by a poor player on the stage.

“This in all his tragedy is so little compared to the enamoured chaos we are created by, and even this disorder we try to escape from. From Chaos We are Borne is an exhibition connecting the chaotic elements of our development and the order that gives it life, with plays on literature from Ayn Rand, Merleau-Ponty, and back to Carl Jung.

“We see echoes of the archetypal trickster, as the musician and the muse, his mother Eris, and this dance across the canvas with childish delight as the shape’s entropy tightens into the story’s subsets. For what is the value of our artists besides as the jester in the tempest? A figure whose divine irreverence allows us to see that in totality we are absurd. These pieces’ beginnings have been designed by two artists: the offspring with her sheer unabashed enjoyment of the paint medium executed without restriction.

Symphonia

“The order placed within it by a master painter and artist acts as a modicum of honesty to the process, all the way back from the child-like creative impulse to that of a meditative wisdom, both having dominant aesthetic control in the expression of this chaos from which we are borne.”

From Chaos We Are Borne, curated by Melanie Erixon for Art Sweven and hosted by Mqabba’s Il-Kamra ta’ Fuq, is on until May 7. Consult the artist’s Facebook page for opening hours.