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The Little Self and the Sealed Room Stockholm/Copenhagen 1998-1999 Jörgen Gassilewski: I experience the search for a conceivable integrity to be an important theme in your work. With constantly changing strategies imagery you have shown that there is no absolute interpretation. this way little by expose areawhere possible self despite all seem consider can operate. image. viewer. as artist. Its if underlyingdriving force work centered around question of integrity. Something that you have really sunk your teeth into during your entire artistic career - something that may also be connected with productive escape strategies and integrity - is painting… Leonard Forslund: Yes, I've always wanted to be a painter. You could say that I have approached painting from different directions to reach this destination. I've tried to find ways to make it possible to work with painting. Painting is probably an El Dorado for escape strategies. Art historically, it's such a loaded expression. Yes, maybe it is artistic integrity that I'm looking for here. At any rate, I think that painting helps me search for intimate facts that can only be found here, or that can only be described or exposed through painting. It isn't completely unimportant that painting, in itself, is very intimate. Painting has a sensuality that is deeply rooted in its form, a sensuality that, among other things, turns vision into a highly impressionable function.  JG: But, at the same time that painting has a very intimate side it is also one of the most aloof art forms. With its oppressive tradition it signals value, quality. It has an object or commodity character which I think is underlined in many of your pieces. Sometimes by the high gloss finish, pretty surface effects, and sophisticated materials. Sometimes by using illusionistic segments, trompe l'oeil and highlights. The first exhibition I saw with your work was Fra det illustrerede (From the Illustrated) at Galleri Basilisk in 1986. Already at this point there was a tension between distance and intimacy which seems to have a destabilizing effect on the viewer of your work. There is an unmistakable love for painting here. And at the same time a painterliness within quotations marks, or at any rate, problematic. Here we have something that look like tall altarpieces with the four elements as the subject. Dark, nocturnal painterly pieces dripping with lacquer... LF: In this exhibition the dripping lacquer is a staging of time, of unfinished time... JG: That was a bit like Painting with a big P… LF: The whole exhibition w0as staged. By the accompanied text and by the title Fra det illustrerede, ambiguous as it is in Swedish. The text was a narrative compounded with prepared quotations from science fiction authors like Clarke and Bradury, among others. It was a pretty mystical room all about simulation, duplication, production. What French philosophy of the time called simulacra. Simply the fundamental elements of culture. |
