Karoline Winter

In their quest for meaning and concrete answers to their existence, individuals have always manifested the need for a “religion-less” spirituality, which is not necessarily linked to a “religious God”. An internal spirituality which is introspective research, and recovery of the sacredness and the mystery. Hence, Karoline Winter’s painting is an evolved work, as it is able, through mastery of the technique and a skillful modulation of light and colour, to reach valuable concepts of analysis, synthesis and logic on the invisible structure of the Universe. Winter is a seeker of the divine who, through her art, is able to externalise the subtle link between the invisible cosmos and the material physicality of its elements. Hence, art can become a medium for spiritual reconciliation, as it is able to overcome the natural limits through transcendency and its vital energy. The result of the union of sentiment, thought and action, which is able to reach beyond darkness and everything that it stands for: the immanent, the material, the finite. 

We’re in front of a painting that becomes a means for elevation and aesthetic intuition, inviting to contemplation as essential and founding element in the communion with the supernatural. It is a pictorial language which is able to move away from the terrestrial materiality, to the enchantment of the mystery: images and shapes of rare poetry, fed by a mystical seduction and sublime tones which are almost lulled by elegant reflections and hues. Her whole production is permeated by recalling of the Shintoist religion, where the concept of sacredness is represented by nature itself, and where each element of the Creation becomes the highest expression of the divine, and it expresses one of the ways to reach the contemplation of the intangible and the perception of the sacred dimension of the Universe. In front of works of such huge visual and emotional impact, charged with spirituality and noble lyricism, the observer senses the infinite greatness of the soul, and feels how time and space are treated by the artist as uncatchable entities, where all chaos becomes order. 

Hence, her painting celebrates the importance of contemplation as an element that brings within an essential process of interiorization, of regressing to the origins as a subjective experience, which allows the individual to go from the intimacy to the mystery of existence. Karoline Winter’s pictorial language tries to externalise the ineffable grandiosity of the Universe, to discover what’s beyond the logical schemes, in order to reach a new cognitive realism. The contemplative dimension is manifested in its essential importance to the pictorial act, and recalls the ancient platonic pre-concepts, based on the fact that it is the highest moment of existence, as drawing from ideas (archetypes of the sensitive world) poses man in proximity to his origin. Each painting is able to find its own private space and to express, in an intimate way, the deepest contact with Creation and the underlying strata of the universe, which hide energetic dimensions that only a sensitive soul can touch. Winter’s pictorial method combines technique and spiritual practice, acting as mediator between ordinary world and intangible world, with the intent to re-establish balance and harmony, and connecting the individual with other levels of existence. In each of her artworks we find that quest for spirituality as individual and solitary path, which has to stem exclusively from one’s own interiority, and communicates her intimate research, intended as analysis of what binds us with the infinite and the divine side that’s in us. 

Monica Ferrarini