Text by Adam Rosenkvist
Critic and art historian

In an interview, the artist Gerhard Nordström told about his youth's trips to the great museums. The friends competed; how close could they get to the masterpieces? Ideally, there should only be a few millimeters between the tip of their nose and the canvas. When the caretakers looked away, they sometimes tried to experience the corpus di colores, the body of color, even through the most careful touch.

Just the memory of once touching a Rembrandt captivated Nordström. Regardless of the truthfulness, the anecdote testifies to a deep love for color, for its substance and metaphysics – for all that can be achieved with just a little pigment and oil.

I don't know if Jesper Nyrén has tried to feel a Piero della Francesca during any of his study trips to Arezzo. But it wouldn't surprise me. The quiet poetry of materiality that is found in Nyrén's paintings is, I believe, closely related to Nordström's love of color.

Nyrén's combinations of textures, shades and gradations rarely pretend to be anything other than just paint on canvas. But that's enough for them to flow towards the viewer as low-key sensations. Damp moss, cold morning air, a scorching slab of stone – yet just a little pigment and oil. In their sincere literalness, the fields of color sometimes even border on the supernatural, as if they were just thin veils over existence. It takes a special trust in color to reduce one's expression as far as Nyrén has done. A loving trust.

However, seeing feels insufficient when looking at Nyrén's work. One longs to also touch the body of paint. The interaction between the gaze and the (forbidden) touch is so close that the painting becomes haptic. And we the viewer? We wait for the caretaker to look away...