That degree of authentic aesthetic excitation is a rare thing, and it is always a surprising and bracing thing to discover. This is the reason the art of Karen Gunderson is so extraordinary a revelation, and why it is appropriate that she has been gifted with her first solo exhibition in Spain at so prestigious a venue as the Circulo de Bellas Artes. To accomplish the conveyance of aesthetic bliss requires a full mastery of the means of art, and it requires something more. The artist who would aspire to more than merely a display of technique, who would attempt to achieve the true purposes of art, must essentially remake art. The artist who would live up the examples that have preceded her and would visit the spirit of our inmost nature on the inert materials of the earth must forge a form of art that has never been encountered before. She must find in the established artistic techniques a manner of art that is utterly new. This is precisely what Gunderson has achieved.

For art can grow cold. The vigor of its gestures can wither and become sclerotic, settle in stiffness and be overwhelmed with an encroaching deadness. If the animating essence of its nature is not renewed, the inert materials of the earth may overtake the vivacity of its urge. A continual heat is requisite, a fulgurating instigation of ever new impulses and ever new approaches, of new uses for the methods that have proved their worth, must be constantly applied—like the stoking and feeding of a flame that, without the addition of the fuel of inspiration, will come to gutter, leaving only the blackened chars of burnt wood. The sticks of mere material must be infused with a heart of light.

One can see the brilliant light of a new art, of art renewed and made itself again, throughout this exhibition of paintings by Gunderson. “Karen Gunderson: Black Paintings” displays more than a dozen works covering visual themes that the artist has been exploring and making her own over a period of years—the themes of enormous floral studies, kings and queens of exemplary moral stature, and, as the centerpiece of this exhibition, the Crucifixion. Among them all, you can see the evidence of something new, something never accomplished before. They constitute the matured acquisition of an entirely new conception for the use of paint—a thoroughly reconsidered method for the rendering of the aesthetically charged image. Here, by Gunderson’s hand, the creativity of art itself has been re-created.