My love for oil painting developed from a spellbinding encounter with a painting by Tage Nilsson depicting a breastfeeding woman that hung in my grandfather's house when I was two years old. Every time I saw the painting again in the years that followed, it was equally affecting and transformative. For many hours I sat lost in the color forms while the adults toasted on. As a young man, I loved Picasso/Braque, van Gogh and Soutine.

At Pernby's Painting School, this love for painting, especially Swedish painting, deepened. Åke Göransson and Evert Lundkvist took hold of my soul, as did Alf Lindberg and Torsten Andersson, Siri Derkert and Vera Nilsson. Under Börje Axelsson's good-natured indulgence and Håkan Blomkvist's sympathetic encouragement, I managed to make a number of paintings for the first time that were both in keeping with tradition and my own.

During my time at the Academy, I was struck by Anselm Kiefer. The weight and the pressure. With the Machine Paintings (Galleri Olsson 1993) which I showed in their entirety at the Academy in 2004, I wanted to undress the world, to understand what drives us at an increasingly furious pace towards the edge of destruction. With my square paintings – Singularities (Tomelilla 2016), destruction itself was the theme. Formally, it felt like I found a synthesis for all my different aspirations in expressive minimalism.

I am a painter, educated in the last modernist era where Cecanne/Picasso and not Duchamp, who came to represent the primarily conceptual in art, were the fixed stars and art was connected to the magical and mysterious, where oil painting was normality and masterpieces the Holy Grail.

I loved this world of debated thoughts and feelings, sweat, soaring dreams, laughter and tears. The attitude I inherited was that the rules, the inner mathematics of painting, are emotionally measurable and readable. I believe in the poetic power of oil paint and its ability to reconnect with ourselves and each other in a physically and mentally direct way.

To stare silently is to converse with one's own soul. It is a belief in the power of lines and colors, that color chords convey experiences we can all feel.
That painting can, in a direct, unfiltered way, touch us in the depths of our compassion, in everyone's heart.
That individual experiences can convey a collective existential experience that enriches us all.

My most important modernist experience is the freedom and duty to invent new true languages.

Thomas Henriksson, Berlin, May 2024.