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On Lennart Fägerskiöld’s Painting
Lennart Fägerskiöld investigates the first strata of painting. He reveals the fundamental layers – the initial steps – that lead to the composition, structure and appearance of the painting. As a means of showing this underlying construction, his paintings are executed with merely a few distinct layers of paint, where each one of them lies in full view. Lennart Fägerskiöld provides us with the painting prior to it becoming an image, at a stage where it exists solely in the traces of how the paint is applied to the surface.
I see his actions as a way of holding on to the initial decision itself to paint. The result is a delayed and drawn-out impetus, where Fägerskiöld calls attention to the rationale behind the urge to utilise one’s painterly tools. A positive survey of what painting is – or what it can be – is embedded in his works. Fägerskiöld does not primarily seek answers, however, but instead finds it more satisfying to pose questions. With the completion of the paintings existing as a promising possibility.
In his both reduced and expansive pictorial language, Fägerskiöld uses a minimal amount of material to achieve maximal expression. He makes use of both a dynamic flow as well as a precise haphazardness. What is immediately obvious is his interest for the optical effects of the colour that he juxtaposes in sharp contrast to the more neutral presence of the surroundings. Hence, the paintings take on the character of visual exclamation marks.
At first glance, Fägerskiöld’s paintings possess a skew abstraction of sorts. Although they appear to be built up of playful symbols for something non-figurative, I nevertheless get the impression that he in fact works with a form of realism. Here we have a preoccupation with the procedures of painting, a utilization of the material’s physical reality and its effects. Fägerskiöld’s painting maintains a close relationship to the movements of the body and the shifting of the gaze, and is characterised by a methodical combination of analysis and practice.
Perhaps one can see Lennart Fägerskiöld’s works as models of paintings. As spatial segments that bear a singularly profound inward influence – into the painting, into the viewer. Their abrupt signals affect both the physical space as well as the illusory space of the painting. The works convey a very direct sense of a this – a here.
Magnus Bons