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My exhibitions are completely theatrical, staged. There is an ambiguity here: A longing for straight forwardness, intimacy, but still wanting distance and control. In this exchange the elements of language - titles and texts - are very important, if not central. On one level they mark the boundaries for the room and the structures of meaning. A year later, in the exhibition Anamnes/Katamnes there was also a text segment. Anamnesis means the prehistory of a sickness and catamnesis the aftermath, as told by the patient. The work included the upper-case first letters of both conditions and could be called "A(Museum)K" or "A(Nature Morte)K" and the motif consisted of cut-outs of realistic details from pertinent environments: The interior of a museum and a classic fruit and flower still life. They stood there like silhouettes on a neutral monochrome background. The texts were fluent philosophical arguments, like a negation of the paintings. 
JG: Maybe one could say that the texts and the titles have even framed the pictures time-wise? They were some sort of residue. They spoke in a negation or interspace about the prehistory of the paintings and aftermath or consequences of the paintings. The painting "A(Atom)K" was square with a royal. The served, middle. You give a name to the atomized symbol. The served, isolated myth without function or context, but with an aura. The literal layering in the pictures that began with Anamnes/Katamnes is completely followed through in the exhibition Anonymus (Anonymous) that was shown at Galleri Sten Eriksson in 1989. I think that this was one of the most consistently conceptual exhibitions you've ever done. It had a rigid consistency. Every picture consisted of three separate parts, respectively: A title, a shadowy silhouette in gray tints, and an image in relief. These panting, shadow-like layers accentuate recognizable medial incidents during the 20th century. An image could consist of a silhouette of Mahatma Gandhi at his loom, a relief of propaganda posters from the German nazi party NSDAP, and the title "January 28, 1986" - The date the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Anonymus is about anonymity and about the loss of meaning. The three incidents in these pictures have no contact, no relationship, the viewer starts the play between them… LF: …and it's about painting. Anonymus was the first exhibition where I consciously tried to expose painting for some kind of maximum pressure. Both through structures of meaning and technically. Its illusionism, its materiality. Later I tried to melt or fuse the perspectives together in the problematics of painting, where here - as you say - I worked in the concrete layer. I tried to analyze the situation, tried to see which weapons I had at my disposal in this battle. Each one of these layers in the painting was saturated with content and imagery - self-sufficient you could say. It was about general symbols of identification pertinent to the anonymous masses of the 20th century. An accelerated life pattern. What interested me was the abstractness that arose when I crossed several of these emblematic incidents - an anonymous space… JG: Anonymus represents an extreme in this case. A literal isolation of the contents and the painterly segments. Logical and dry. As you say, you later tried to put these different ingredients together, create some kind of fissure in the images - modulated slipping, integrated displacement that can be more difficult to discover. |
