After studying at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm and a stay in Spain in 1965, Kent Lindfors worked in the harbour for five years. He portrayed this environment as well with a realistic pictorial language. He was more interested in the environments than in the workers, and his images have an almost mystical touch, inspired as they are by, among others, Francisco de Zurbarán’s painting. The results are poetically vibrant images, which in later years have become more abstract, with a double exposure of places and themes, such as the mouth of Göta River against Spanish Guadalupe and Compostela.
Already in paintings such as The Pink Door. Harbour Shack 178 (1973–4, Gothenburg Museum of Art) there is an almost religious preoccupation with the mysticism of the place, the worn-down harbour environment, whose shacks and urinals can lead thoughts to seafarer romanticism as well as to ascetic cloister cells. As if in purification, Lindfors is attracted to dirt, as were Jean Genet or Jean Dubuffet before him. Under rusty harbour cranes he finds the genius loci of Gothenburg – the spirit of the place.
Inside the rose-coloured doorway, a deep perspective opens up towards an empty storage room, reinforced by the red lines on the floor and the columns along the sides. Further in, there is an office with glass windows. The crane, which is reflected in the barred window above the doorway, casts a shadow over the stain-covered ground, upon which a cable lies in anxious coils. The subject matter might seem commonplace, but is captured with such feeling that it is transformed into an almost supernatural vision. In the most insignificant objects, Lindfors finds colour, from greyish shades of violet, beige and green, to the intense red tones in the window bars and the floor lines. The painting is not so much a depiction of a workplace as the result of observing the physical world so intensely that it seems to fall apart in colours, shadows and light.
Kristoffer Arvidsson
