October 2023
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The new suite of paintings that I am showing at the exhibition “Another World” at the Academy of Fine Arts constitutes a kind of summary of the artistic, existential and painterly journey that I began during the residency I received through the Academy of Fine Arts at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in the summer of 2018.
In Paris, an alter ego emerged that made me move between realities, to The other world, and gain trust, knowledge and insights that I could not find or articulate in any other way than through painting. Classic mystical, magical and dreamlike myths and stories that carry human dilemmas re-emerged.
In the paintings at the Academy of Fine Arts, a circle seems to close and extremes are integrated. There are trees, clearings, moon and sun – simple motifs in a nature that sprang from within me but at the same time evoked from the painting itself and the vision itself. It is a painting that seeks and brings light.
I also imagine a different kind of art world – a metaphorical place where artists meet in an eternal conversation and exchange across time and space. Recognitions are therefore about resonances and sounding boards of artistic as well as human sensations, stories and experiences.
THE LETTER ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
> About art
In the summer of 2018, I had a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris through the Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. I had made a monumental charcoal drawing across the entire wall of my studio and was going to fix the drawing. To protect myself from the fixative, I dressed in plastic and a mask. An impulse made me take a photo of myself in the outfit. When I then looked at the photo, it was as if an alter ego emerged from the figure and took possession of me.
I began to dress in the plastic and mask at nights in the studio and let my body do what my alter ego pushed me to do. Trance-like Isadora Duncan dervish dances emerged where painting and drawings flowed out of me. My alter ego was like a guardian spirit demanding that I open up layers within me that had been closed. That I would start to see reality anew. Together we began to explore the borderlands artistically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually and physically. We entered the Otherworld and made discoveries of phenomena and truths I had previously not dared or been able to see and accept. Classic mystical, magical and dreamlike myths and stories that carry human dilemmas re-emerged – Alice in Wonderland, Orpheus and Eurydice, Narcissus and Echo.
Artists from art history, Carl Fredrik Hill and Helen Frankenthaler, appeared as companions in the studio. Spirituality, imagination, mysticism and magic created a presence and curiosity that made me more and more able to accept the incomprehensible and contradictory where my feelings and reason had previously fallen short. I moved between realities and gained trust, knowledge and insights that I could not find or formulate in any other way than in painting.
Martin Ålund
