Per Wizén’s works are based on a particular method developed through three decades. His works since the mid-1990s have been based on pre-existing images mostly from established art history, but also from popular culture. He has re-worked paintings by old masters like Paulo Uccello, Antonello de Messina, Caravaggio and Holbein, but also cartoons by Walt Disney based on Lewis Carroll’s books about Alice (Alice in WonderlandandThrough the Looking-Glass) and the original illustrations to the same books by George Tenniel. The signature styles of all these are easily recognizable, often as part of a widely spread cultural knowledge. The ‘style’ is recognizably ‘Uccello’ ‘Caravaggio’, ‘Disney’ or any other, every little detail is extracted from these sources. But the actual motives and themes are new; these re-workings are not tribute works or wishy-washy paraphrases.The works are new, they are now, and they are unsettling.
Power relations, fear, desire, sexual tensions are made visible – maybe they were there also in the original works; but here, unshackled from aged allegories and outmoded metaphors, these sub-motives gain renewed force.
In their first stage, these re-workings are built meticulously as collages from often tiny details cut from reproductions. Some recognizable parts are often only seemingly intact; they are altered, extended, shades adjusted by through this mosaic of miniscule adjustments. Other parts are entirely built from fragments. The price for making these works is taxed from the second-hand book market, where the illustrated editions used tend to become rarities, and from the time invested in their making. To finish a work takes months, sometimes years.
You might consider most of these works as closely relating to painting and painterly traditions. And of course, the great masters contributing were mostly painters. But the reproductions are photographs, and some of the measures taken in the re-workings are of “photographic” nature, like working with the depth of focus.
The final works are prints – digital colour prints, litographs, unique silk screen prints, dia-sec mounts etc – and framed accordingly. This gives Wizén the possibility to work on scales adequate to the works, from the monumental to the intimate. This is where finallythe meeting with the viewer is staged, an encounter where we are pulled into the enigma of Wizén’s visual imagery.
Text: Pontus Kyander