Composition
C. O. Hultén is born in Malmö, and starts painting in 1935, starts the group Minotaur in 1942, which later becomes the fundament for Imaginisterne around 1945. This group later becomes part of Cobra.
C. O. Hultén's art do not only reflect The North, it is in it's
deepest substance one with the North. By this i have said almost everything
about him.
He travels from time to time outside Scandinavia, to seek the postman
Chevals castle in France, to meet an African fetish or an Serbian peasant.
But he mostly travels from the North to the North. He participated in the
Nordic group Cobra, which instead of collecting vegetables, united roots.
Cobra was a promise, and Hultén meets this promise.
Under the Cobra period 1948-1951 our friend C O played with the technique,
most of all he invented 'imprimaget' , he limited and dug out his domain
before he absorbed in it. Other painters in Cobra went through a similar
development for instance the Dutchman Appel and the Belgian Alechinsky.
He discovered that The North is not just a fable and neither just reality,
but both fable and reality, and that the artistic way of expression is
not just a mean but also a universe. Is cloth and paper allready the sky?
Is the colour not allready a soil? Is ink a river - or a night? The trouble
was in this way to get substance of the universal art to coincide with
the Nordic reality-fable. How did Hultén succeed with this. Through
a rare spontaneity, a seeking sponatneity that moves with thousands of
various speeds, and looks like the Nordic way of thinking towards the language,
while people from the south thinks from the language.
The spontaneity that interests us is not the dashing elegance, but
the strength that first swallows the technique and then bites. The fundamental
reality-fable at Hultén appear to be the night, the night that despite
the furniture factories is the most important speciality in Scandinavia,
the night from where the light has to be pulled out in an endless love
dispute.
The North itself is a boundless drawing or rather a boundless engraving,
which portray the birth of the night, life and death, from the icy beach
to the spring forrest, from a village of small flakes, to a city of great
lines, from a river full of stars to a sky full of lakes, from the dimness
of midday, to the midnight sun. In the south the darkness and light changes
with harmonious equality. In the North they fight, love each other and
parts just to be mixed together again, from here to eternity.
Hulténs works shows this story and this geography, these meetings,
and these mixtures, and I most of all think of a new litograph, where you
see the light explode the night without supressing it. Without supressing
the night, without covering the changing excited, violent and vivid travel
from night against light and without supressing the jump of spontanity,
scratches and cracks towards the work.
Hulténs art is cosmic that is why it is sincere.
Christian Dotremont, 1962
In 1949 Appel, Constant, Corneille, Hulten, and Osterlin made the lithograph
'Some of these days' shown below.
About other Cobra artists
Piere Alechinsky
Else Alfelt
Karel Appel
Mogens
Balle
Ejler Bille
Corneille
Christian
Dotremont
Sonja
Ferlov
Stephen
Gilbert
Svavar
Gudnason
Henry
Heerup
C. O.
Hultén
Egill Jacobsen
Asger Jorn
Erik Ortvad
Carl-Henning
Petersen
Max
Walter Svanberg
Anders
Österlin