Katrin Koskaru — À propos — Slash Paris

Katrin Koskaru’s painting focuses on the way power and violence blaze a trail through history and into our minds; the way the clues and signs they leave behind in time are lost; and the way architecture, a vector for ideology, helps the process along. Collection of information underpins a significant part of the work of this artist, as she scrupulously monitors the military scene and accumulates articles, images and videos gleaned from the press or the Internet, some of them first-hand accounts by people in conflict zones. This material, subject to the hazards of translation and broadcasting, inevitably emerges shrunken, turning war into a refractory subject. Katrin Koskaru’s painting relies on this entropic continuum. She erases, abolishes signs, retains the marks left by the application of wash. Margins (discrepancies?) are a feature of quite a few paintings, while collage — paper on polyester, for example — renders the surface more complex. Diaphanous and unpredictable, watercolour comes to terms with the accidental, highlighting a certain fragility. The tools, moreover, are unimpressive — the ballpoint, for instance — and Karin Koskaru juggles with the instability of pastel and bleach to make newly formed images vaporise. The figurative dissolves into nebulous, abstract landscapes, leaving the spectator feeling blinded. Destruction is the name of the game. The luminous flashes that seem to flood each composition cannot but remind us of the atom bomb. In this atmospherically rendered painting there must surely lie the possibility of representing what cannot be represented.

— Antoine Camenen for L’ahah, 2019.
(translation : John Tittensor)