Still Life

Pearl necklace. Shining pearls with their peculiar glow, like drops of mist. A necklace torn from someone’s neck, and dropped to the dark parquet floor. The young man seen in profile is bending over the necklace, supporting himself on his right arm, watching the necklace keenly?  – but his eyes are closed. It looks more as if he is feeling the smell of the pearls. Do pearls have a smell? Sometimes a hint of perfume might still linger around the pearls. His dress is green, from emerald to greyish green hues. The fabric looks like silk, the style might be from the baroque. His neck is exposed, as are parts of his shoulder and collarbone. The light on his chestnut-coloured hair and pale face is theatrical, it seems to be directed at him straight from the left, like a headlight sitting on the floor.

If you don’t know the dual meaning of “pearl necklace”, a momentary indiscretion must be admitted. Semen dropped on the neck or the chest of a lover is sometimes and by some called by this poetical euphemism. Pearl necklace. Thus, the boy leaning over the necklace on the floor takes on a more dubious meaning. You might think of it as a picture of sexual longing, the devotion of a lover to the object of his love. You might think of it as the aftermath of an encounter of lovers. But if you prefer a chimney pipe to be a chimney pipe, or a cigar a cigar, just think of it as a necklace dropped on the floor by someone too much in a hurry to notice their loss. 

(Per Wizén, Pearl Necklace I, 2024)

Death, be not proud. I want to to tell this straight to the face of Death: You have no power, you might grin over your last conquest, but you’re so weak, easier to break than a string of pearls, frailer than an old man, grinning still, through the mist of his demented mind. 

This peculiar skull shaped from pearls is placed on this same parquet floor. The wooden blocks are all in a warm reddish tone, some paler, others darker. The depth of the space is unclear, a dark shadow falls like a drape in the background. The skull is made from pearls meticulously placed to create a minimal sense of relief, of depth. They are all irregular in size. A broken necklace lies in front of it, not like crossed femur bones, but not far from it. 

Pearl necklace. Death. Sex was never without its risks, disease has since long been the unwanted spice of erotic encounters. Once syphilis was the great threat, the reaper of physical beauty, mental health and finally life. In the 1980s the HIV virus and the fatal aids disease broke into our consciousness, the gay plague that soon proved not to be just affecting gay people. Sex and sorrow became bedfellows once more, a broken string of sorrow strewn across a whole community, until braking medicines were found that could stop the pandemic and save the lives of people affected. Death, thou shalt die.

(Per Wizén, Pearl Necklace II, 2024)

An encounter. But of what kind? The two men are involved in an interaction that might be brotherly (“you have my back”), imperative (“are you with us or not?”), in confidence (“this stays between us”) or other possible ways. Look at their gazes: you can’t see neither of the men’s eyes, but the one at the back with a light tan on his skin is likely directing his eyes on the one with the pale eyes, and he is clearly addressing the other with his gaze. The other is not yet responding. He is looking down, maybe just listening, searching for words, maybe in embarrassment, maybe hesitating in the face of a challenge he wasn’t prepared for. Is this a picture of innocence facing experience? 

More than usual, this scene is a tripartite affair. The young men might be avoiding each other’s – and our – gazes. But we are watching them, like peeping Toms, from a safe distance. We form a geometric figure, to be precise an isosceles triangle, the base being the short distance between the young men’s heads. 

What sort of space are they occupying? That’s hard to say, the depth is minimal, or then it is just very dark, and the only light is directed at the two men. Theatre comes to mind again, but also painting, with the dramatic contrasts between the human skin tones, shadows and a dark backdrop, which takes on a greenish tone to the right. A heavy drape, or a space losing its depth into darkness. 

With all the focus placed on the two men, losing the background in a darkish blur, the work does also connect to photography, as when you adjust the aperture of the camera to achieve a minimal depth of focus. It is on the one hand painting, on the other photography. Both apply to the slick surface mounted behind a glass. 

There is a fascinating crossing of art histories in the work. You might think – for good reason – of Caravaggio when you see the two male figures: it is his Saint John the Baptist opposed to a figure from Concert (c. 1595). These are technically among the sources of this composite work. But when you study the composition, situation and psychology, this is much more of the late 18^th or early 19^th centuries. The intimate psychology is far from the theatricality of the aristocratic Baroque era, and much closer to the intimacy of 19^th century with artists like David and J-A-D Ingres. But beyond this, it is an image of our own time, with no specific narrative, with no obvious symbolism, with an oblique if not opaque meaning: the artist keeps his cards close to his chest. The process of interpretation will have no point of closure, it will remain open, like the best artworks always do.

(Per Wizén, Paths Crossed, 2024)

Text: Pontus Kyander

Photo: Carl Henrik Tillberg

Undercurrents

2022, Moderna Museet, Malmö // Cecilia Hillström Gallery, Stockholm

In this exhibition, Moderna Museet Malmö presents new works by Per Wizén (b. 1966). The pieces were created in the wake of a journey back into the artist's own childhood, set off by his discovery of some long-forgotten Disneyland magazines from the 1970s in an attic.

Through the lens of popular cultural images, Wizén invites us into colourful fantasies based on Disney's versions of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. The two characters share a common theme: they confront worlds that lie beyond the known, the illuminated, the rational—worlds of opportunity but also of darkness. As always in Wizén's complex artistry, these new works are intimately linked with earlier ones, delving deeper into certain aspects.

The large-scale photographs are based on collages composed of tens of thousands of image fragments, meticulously arranged by the artist in an extremely complex and time-consuming process. New worlds are created from existing images. Adventure stories and a return to his own childhood form layers in these new works, but beneath the innocent and playful surfaces lurks something disconcerting.

Wizén's working method relies on a strict set of self-imposed rules, precision, and great patience. While working with his collages, Wizén keeps the whole of the new picture in mind while simultaneously concentrating on the details. The process may be likened to deep meditations that open the door for something unexpected and dark to emerge—something the intellect cannot grasp. It is there, beyond words, that the artist's world and the observer's world meet.

Per Wizén lives and works in Malmö. His work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions in Sweden, Finland, the United States, and several other countries. Undercurrents is Per Wizén's first solo show at Moderna Museet. Examples of the artist's work are included in the collections of a number of Swedish and international museums.

Text: Iris Müller-Westermann

Photo: Helene Toresdotter

Trespassers

2019, Cecilia Hillström Gallery, Stockholm // CHART Art Fair 2019, Cecilia Hillström Gallery [DK]

What hides behind the mirror? Alice's hand moves over the sleek surface which slowly begins to "melt away, just like a bright silvery mist" as Lewis Carroll writes. For a brief moment the mirror is permeable, it is possible to pass into the space behind. That room beyond is - almost - identical to the room behind her; after passing through the mirror she stands on an identical mantelpiece, but the further she ventures the more the world turns peculiar.

Lewis Carroll was far from the first to be enthralled by the enigmatic world beyond the mirror. What laws of man or nature might rule behind the glass? Just like the underworld into which Alice fell in the first book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the mirror world of its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), is a place submitted to other laws and conditions than those that govern in front of the glass. The world beyond is a labyrinth where all movements follow the rules of chess; it is also a dream world from which the protagonist conveniently wakes up at the end of the story. Already the first editions of the books included the illustrations by John Tenniel, pictures that have become so integral to our visual culture that even people who never read the books know the images.

The labyrinth as well as the deep forest are places where the usual laws of existence cease to apply, where rationality have no more say and thus opens a door to horror, despair and insanity. This is the forest where Dante found himself lost in the beginning of Divina Commedia (1320), this is where the protagonist of the peculiar Renaissance work Hypnoerotomachia Poliphili (1499) was brought in a dream, and it is likewise this kind of labyrinthine wood where Orlando lost his mind in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516). Dream and reality shift places in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

(1596) where the dark mazelike forest allows for transgressions shattered by daylight and awakening.

Per Wizén's reinterpretations of Tenniel's illustrations don't allow for a return or an awakening; the dream is all, the looking-glass world is one without redemption or return. Here a labyrinth without walls, that in the book is determined by the movements of chess pieces, is replaced by Wizén with garden mazes of tall hedges, or the labyrinths formed by a dense forest or a set of playing cards.

Trees and shrubs that Tenniel at the most implies at the edges of his images is by Wizén's collage technique - which is manual and extremely time-consuming - expanded into parks and forests. In other images walls and vaults only represented with a few lines in Tenniel's drawings are stretched out into entire rooms and corridors.

The labyrinth is a recurring motive in the smaller format pictures that Per Wizén presented a few years ago under the title Subterranean (2016). These images are totally "Tenniel" in style - each and every line is drawn by the British illustrator, before being broken into the tiny fragments of the collage works.

But the motives of Per Wizén's re-workings break off into twisted and contemporary directions. The claustrophobic corridors of Stanley Kubrick's movie The Shining (1980) are obvious references beyond the 19th century horizon of Tenniel's; the outdoor maze from the same movie appears with similar self-assertation in several other works. Also the motive of twins, central to Kubrick's film, is recurring in Per Wizén's Alice series.

These and other film references becomes evident in Trespasser I-II (2019), two large-scale silkscreen prints. A violent game with doubles plays out in Trespasser / where one Alice, squatting on the mantelpiece with her arms stretched down, just a moment earlier has pushed her twin image off the ledge. While the pose of the first figure expresses force and determined aggression, the other falls to the floor like a rag doll. In the following image Alice has passed through the mirror and stands kneeling on the mantelpiece with her hair like a veil over her face. The mirror wall behind her is filled with an almost tangible darkness of a passage- like room. It is a darkness resembling of a black fog similar to the baleful visual noise in the Japanese horror movie Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) where - instead of a mirror - a TV screen becomes the passage between rational and irrational, through which a woman crawls with her hair hanging over her face. In Nalkata's film as well as in Wizén's print, the mirror opens up to a parallel and threatening reality. Out of the safe and familiar world of Tenniel's illustrations, Wizén's collage-process evokes a deep unease - a familiar phrase from psychoanalysis speaks of the uncanny - that balances the ethereal elegance of the picture against a precipice of horror.

Theatricality is apparent in Wizén's works. The characters interact as if they were on a stage, with the lights set at the middle of it, and backdrops creating a small scenic space with a sparse setup of props. What goes on here is a masque with continuous changes of roles. The masks change, change places, and are pulled over each other. The Knight, Alice, the Rabbit, they are all empty and interchangeable masks; that some of them have a past as chess pieces in Carroll's and Tenniel's book has little relevance anymore. Now they interact in a theatre of cruelty, where the thin line between play and abuse is constantly touched and transgressed. This is particularly apparent in one of Wizén's latest large format works, Reenactor (2019). As in a puppet theatre two arms with hands wrapped in tiny clothes are stretched down, fingers sprawling, against a backdrop of a stone wall. The scene reminds of a prison yard, or the ascetic courtyard of Pasolini's last film Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodom (1975). On the floor of the stage lies the Rabbit's head torn off, bathing in a puddle of blood and Alice's head (or maybe just a mask) with an open fan lying by. The flimsy word-play of the Alice books is far away. If this is a dream scenery, it is not one where the verbal flow of association runs free as in Carroll's and Tenniel's books, but one where the visual language is based on gestures and ritual, in line with what dramatist Antonin Artaud prescribed to his Théâtre Cruel.

Per Wizén enacts dark games in his works. The implied forest or labyrinth that is a backdrop to many of the black and white Alice images, is brought to the fore in Blue Hunt (2019). A desolate forest is constructed from elements picked out of a garish children's cartoon. The composition resembles the famous painting by Paulo Uccello usually called The Hunt, but without the myriad of hunters, horses, hounds and game found in the small panel painting. The forest stands waste and empty, the perspective is enhanced in the manner of Uccello by the decaying tree trunks in the foreground of the picture, spread out in a fan-shape on the forest floor. Grass and flowers on the ground are bathing in a soft light, while the tree-crowns and the sky are dark. The trunks writhe like arabesques - they are based on the drawings for Disney's animation film Alice in Wonderland 1951). Hundreds of copies of a cartoon version from the early 1970s have been pillaged for building elements to the collage. But as the forest stands empty, we are yet again on a stage, waiting for the actors to enter. Will they be Oberon, Titania, Puck and their parade of fairies and mythological creatures - as in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream - or is this the venue for a sexuality forced out into the shadows of the forests and the parks? The title certainly refers to one or another form of hunt.

This latter interpretation is closer at hand in an older work by Wizén, The Hunt (2003-2005), which is a collage reworking of Uccello's panel painting. The latter hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the University city that was the hometown of Lewis Carroll (and of Alice Liddell, the child who inspired the books on Alice's adventures). While Uccello's work is a relatively small panel (originally placed on a cassone, a decorated bridal chest containing some of the bride's dowry), Wizén's reworking is in a large scale. Blue Hunt is not so much a paraphrase of Uccello's painting as of Wizén's own earlier work. Also Blue Hunt has what is required of a monumental work, with its arabesque lines and almost monochrome colour fields. It brings out the carnivalesque aspects of the forest and the labyrinth, both the Bucolic and the Bacchanalian, the peace of a déjeuner sur l'herbe as well as the merry passing of a company of satyres. This work opens up in a different way than other works of Per Wizén to the projections of the viewer. It is a sun-lit glade that, in the words of Shakespeare, also allows for dreamy reconciliation:

If we shadows have offended, Think but this - and all is mended

- That you have but slumbered here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream

(William Shakespeare, from the epilogue to A Midsummer Night's Dream)

Text: Pontus Kyander

Subterranean II

2016, CHART Art Fair 2019, Cecilia Hillström Gallery [DK]

Underlandet lockar oss – och glider undan

Dubbelnaturen blir central i Per Wizéns verk där han fångar den del av oss som styrs av begär och drifter. I John Tenniels illustrationer till böckerna om Alice i Underlandet hittar han ständigt nytt material att utforska och bearbeta. Tenniels bilder, som ursprungligen skapades för Lewis Carrolls berättelser, har blivit en ständigt återkommande källa för Wizén, där han söker djupare förståelse och skapar nya lager av betydelse genom sina egna collage.

I en av de mest kända (och mest förvirrande) passagerna av Alice i spegellandet försöker den vite riddaren förklara skillnaden mellan vad något heter och vad något kallas. Alla Alices ansträngningar leder bara till nya missförstånd; den berörda sången heter en sak, men dess namn kallas något annat. Detta är i sin tur något helt annat än vad själva sången kallas. Genom denna förvirring lyckas Carroll utforska språket och de dolda betydelserna bakom ord, något som är genomgående i hela Alice-berättelserna. Lewis Carrolls två böcker om Alice är mästerstycken i undanglidandets konst. Ingenting är någonsin vad det verkar vara, eller också är det så precist beskrivet att förklarandet bara leder till förvirring. Detta skapar en känsla av osäkerhet som är lika lockande som den är förvirrande, vilket gör att läsaren dras in i en värld där inget är definitivt eller förutbestämt. Inte undra på att Tove Jansson, vars illustrationer man nu kan se på Millesgården, insisterade på att betona det svarta och mörka i den berättelse som Bonniers ville se som en gullig barnbok. Denna djupare, mörkare tolkning är en påminnelse om hur Alice i Underlandet fungerar på flera nivåer och hur författaren rör sig mellan det oskyldiga och det komplexa.

Det är också därför Alice i Underlandet är en så frekvent referens i science fiction, till exempel i filmen The Matrix; där ställs frågor om vilken av världarna som är den “verkliga”. Filmen, liksom Carrolls bok, rör sig kring tvivel och osäkerhet om verklighetens natur och bjuder in till spekulationer om vad som egentligen är sant. Inte heller undra på att Per Wizén så ofta återkommer till John Tenniels originalillustrationer till Carrolls böcker. I dessa hittar konstnären ständigt nytt material att fördjupa sig i och omforma för att skapa nya tolkningar och betydelser som talar till vår samtida upplevelse av världen.

På Cecilia Hillström visar Per Wizén ett antal fotogravyrer som utgår just från Tenniels bildvärld. Wizén skapar collage av det material som redan finns i originalbilderna, men han omstrukturerar dessa bilder så att andra narrativ och perspektiv blir synliga. Detta tillvägagångssätt belyser hans vilja att utforska och utmana de ursprungliga verken och deras betydelser, samtidigt som han skapar något helt nytt. Kanske kan man säga att Wizén söker bildens omedvetna; det som finns där utan att vara riktigt synligt. Genom att på så vis titta “bakom” bilden skapar han verk som behandlar vårt omedvetna – den del av oss som styrs av begär och drifter men som vi ändå inte riktigt har kontakt med.

När jag tittar på de omsorgsfullt utförda collagen blir det tydligt för mig hur personliga de är. Wizén skär för hand ut och frilägger de bildfragment som han sedan monterar och reproducerar. Man kan därför också säga att verken till stor del handlar om konstnärens omedvetna, där den meditativa skapandeprocessen blottlägger det egna begäret. Genom att använda sig av fysiska material, såsom skarpa skalpeller och lim, gör han skapandeprocessen synlig för betraktaren, vilket skapar en starkare koppling mellan konstnärens inre värld och det verk han skapar.

Med utställningen Subterranean rör sig Per Wizén mellan olika nivåer av dolt och synligt, och behandlar frågor om begär och identitet, där dubbelnaturen blir central. Verket Smoke and Mirror är en nyckel i detta sammanhang. När jag tittar på spegeln blir jag efter ett tag osäker på vilken sida om den som verkligheten finns. Med utgångspunkt i denna osäkerhet behandlar Wizén sedan relationen mellan den vite riddaren och Alice. Genom att skapa en atmosfär av förvirring och speglingar tvingar han betraktaren att ifrågasätta vad som är verkligt och vad som är spegelbild, vilket gör att verken belyser de komplexa frågor om identitet och perception som genomsyrar både Alice-berättelserna och Wizéns egna verk.

Hos Per Wizén ligger inte fokus på den sångtitel som gäckar Alice, utan på (identitets)spelet mellan henne och riddaren. I sviten Horse Around har riddarens springare nästan reducerats till en schackpjäs, fast Wizén har satt hästens huvud på Alices kropp. Underkuvad tvingas flickan in i riddarens verklighet, som om konstnären vill peka på språkets performativa möjlighet att forma vår tillvaro. Detta handlar inte bara om en yttre handling, utan också om en inre förändring där Alice genomgår en transformation. Å andra sidan visar det sig längre fram i sviten att Alice även finns inuti riddaren. I Horse Round IV tränger hennes huvud sonika fram ur riddarens kropp. Denna osynliga förbindelse mellan Alice och riddaren ger uttryck för den inre kamp och den ständiga förskjutning av identiteter som både karaktärerna och verken själva genomgår.

Lika skickligt som Lewis Carroll dribblar bort sina läsare, spelar Per Wizén på föreställningar om makt, dominans och (bild)språk. Hotet som kommer utifrån kommer också inifrån. Den dominerade är också den dominanta. Wizén påminner oss om att identitet och makt inte är fasta, utan alltid i rörelse, alltid i förhandling. Denna dynamik mellan dominerande och dominerad, mellan synligt och osynligt, mellan verklighet och illusion, är något som hela hans verk utforskar på ett djupt och fängslande sätt.

Om mötet mellan Alice och den vite riddaren skriver Carroll: “Bland allt det besynnerliga som Alice såg under sin färd bakom spegeln var det ingenting som hon alltid mindes så tydligt som det här.” Det förstår jag verkligen. Det är en upplevelse av förvirring och insikt, av att vara både inne i och utanför en värld som ständigt förändras. Ändå kan jag också kallas förvirrad. Fast det bara är så det heter.

Text: Håkan Nilsson

*******

YOU ARE BEHIND THE LOOKING-GLASS

I go down into the earth, down into the Underworld, to greet you.

I've heard rumours that this is where you live; people have gossiped about it since Inanna, Orfeus, Ulysses, Aeneas and Dante did their thing. But the road leading there runs unexpectedly right straight through the surface of an image that is blocking me, it's like I have to move beyond it to regain my body and my eyes way down there, that is Alice, that is, so to speak, the Real-Wonder, the Real-Whole-some-Wonder, the Indespensible, the Ever-Underlying-Wonder, the Conversation- With-You.

You are not Alice, not really. But you descend from her. Alice is gone, she is somewhere else. But you exist (I can see it!) behind the looking-glass, on the other side of it, like a shadow. But that is all.

Being speechless disturbs me, I wanted to speak: the speechless conversation can not be controlled and I'm grown up enough to deal with relationships and everyday life with a steady hand and according to my taste, at least this is what I think.

The hand (the shadowhand, not my own) possibly touches the surface from the other side, the membrane of difference, but never by osmosis, only the dangerous observation, the somber meeting of two gazes that do not see each other's origin; me, before the picture, you, within the image of the image, behind the film of glass, captured in grooves, lines, in a graphical composition of for instance insisting absence: a fundamental human existence, which when it is formulated in writing immediately gets dressed in shallow popular spirituality, instead of the temptation and despair of an actual condition.

The symmetry that the guardian clocks represent, amongst other things through their complementary wry sneers shared between themselves, tell me that it is not possible to reach you striving for a meeting or through the relief that communication would bring, but that you reach me via negativity: you outbalance the boundaries for what I'm able to think, it is close to psychosis, it makes things loosen up, it's beautiful and terrible. And I recognize that I was lying before: osmosis is happening: you're leaking over to me, your milled darkness gets through the membrane and reaches into me.

The boundaries of the image and the looking-glass are only valid in a specific sense and now I'm infected, darkened, a bit dissolved and have to look in another direction.

There the dream continues with another scene, other images that follow one another, grow into each other, out of each other, it feels hard and is hard, now you have to give in. You appear as two figures: you have a horse-head over your own (?) and the bewildered knight that also is you (?) holds the bridle loosely or tight. Of course a bell shall be attached to the horse's forehead, so that movements in the forest do not pass unattended, of course the ridiculous make-believe sword is stuck into the earth, a planted cross with no appararent dignity, a clumsy negligent gesture of sacrifice. A ludicrous, extremely strong nightmare.

It changes very quickly.

The care, the curiousness, the urge for control and the surprise are indeed being produced by the same material, but the impressions are flickering, are being reshaped, undermine what I generally think of as a course of events.

For example:

Your knight's head is being put over your girl's head as a hat. The ongoing processes of aging are therefore not by any means reliable or depictable phenomena. (Who are you?) Everything that has been said about these topics is not true. And the darkness of the fake forest is a severe, untruthful garden of deception, that coincides with a series of misleading temple labyrinths of leaves, where disinforma-tion-loaded spheres from outer space are acting as an absurd, mean-ingless, extremely charged scenography for attacks; all of this is the Underworld that has replaced both you and me and eaten us [...] I...] and my eyes are sending their threads into the construction of meaning to more than willingly let themselves be fooled and to get lost in the pictorial universe of fairy-tales that exist to mislead and unmask all positions and securities as accidental, deceptive, illu-sory, unstable and so on, et cetera, and so forth, everything is always something else, it just continues and continues but in an extremely limited corridor, that with its heavy-shaped, vague darkness of confrontation at the end of the tunnel is the proof that we need to finally stop seeking to understand each other: this is the time for violence.

We have confused ourselves: it's dreadful and I can't sort it out.

But maybe an approximate hint is appropriate and possible:

I'm very seldom myself or a child or a grown-up or dead.

I'm more often you or a grown-up or a child or dead.

And then we die.

DOWN INTO FACE LIME I MEAN POWDER (nothing meets us in the shapes of words

go and meet form condescend wonder)

IT'S NOT YOUR LINES THAT ARE PRESSED BUT MINE (nothing makes happy see dirt on bleaching substance

go to the end the mid-part careful bleached)

BY A MIGHTY HAND STRANGELY DETACHED

(nothing is dressed never clothes go to the indefensibly worst)

FROM A CORPUS OF BODIES UNDER A FLOOR OF GLASS (nothing that can cut reflect be cut lead to exaggerations the looking-glass)

WHERE THE LINES THAT I CALL MY OWN

(nothing said of how to hold it no images go to bed in moss wet comprehensible)

ONCE TOOK SHAPE MAJESTICLY BUT RATHER SECRETLY (nothing taken back nothing visible go back converted regret shrunken go back converted regretted shrunken go back converted regretted wonder)

Text: Leif Holmstrand on Per Wizén's Subterranean Series

Translated by Ulf Peter Hallberg

The Disruptive Force of Collage

2013 - 2014, Skissernas museum, Lund

Cutting Encounters.

For the celebration of Skissernas Museum’s 80^th anniversary in 2014 this exhibition with a focus on artistic process evokes the museum’s founder Ragnar Josephson and his profound interest in what he called the birth of the artwork. Josephson’s close analyses of the conception of paintings and sculptures examined the dynamic reciprocity of content and form. Today that interest in the creative process is greater than ever.

The exhibition presents Per Wizén’s oeuvre taking as a point of departure the significance of collage as work material for the final photographic image. For the first time collages from Wizén’s entire production are displayed together with the finished works. The exhibition shows the evolution from the rudimentary construction of the collages of his earliest series Reworkings to the increasing complexity, ambitious scale and conceptual depth of the later collages. For the first time several collages, composed of thousands of fragments, are shown from Wizén’s current series, Subterranean. All of Wizén’s interests converge in these images. The sublime landscape, on the edge of chaste cultivation and untamed wilderness, meets the uncanny of early psychology and the atmospheric changes of colour and light in nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints.

Atmospheric light is central to Wizén. In constructing his images he frequently looks for the condensed light of twilight, the moment when darkness creeps up, or when storm clouds surround us and we begin to question what we see. This state lies at the core of Wizén’s oeuvre. In order to reach this condition he has to create an image that appears untouched despite its being completely constructed – a pictorial space with an entirely convincing surface as familiar as the Renaissance and Baroque paintings from which he often obtains his material. His forceful compositions captivate the eye and inside the multilayered rooms the realism turns enigmatic and the familiar strange. All is not as it seems.

Wizén builds his collages using fragments of reproductions of historical art works taken from art books. He handles the tiny scraps of paper like the lines of a drawing or the paint of a painting – material used to construct new works with an emotional and formal kinship to the originals, but with new content or content where meaning has shifted in relation to the source. At times Wizén reinforces or amplifies a mood that is hidden or dormant in the original work. This process activates internal images and starts a movement of unexpected encounters, a back and forth of intuition and thinking, where thoughts and ideas unite into a new image in the manner of the Surrealists’ chance encounter between sewing-machine and umbrella on the operating table. But if these encounters are to work for Wizén they have to be subtle. While the eye-catching parts of, for example, Surrealist Max Ernst’s collages contribute to their immediate effect and express a species of surface violence, Wizén does not want our gaze to fixate on the details, nor to remain on the surface of the image. Instead, he is concerned with creating a seemingly familiar surface that only eventually gives way and reveals the underlying tensions.

For Wizén, this new room can only be created by fundamentally rebuilding and extending the original images. He distorts and creates new subjects, but if the final work is to function, the rhythm and lines from the original work – the inner logic of the image – must be present in all their variety. Thus the parts that make up the new work of art need to be endlessly varied in order to fill the image with the visual information that is required if the eye is not to tire. A digital repetition of the constituent parts would produce a static image, which would not be credible. And so for Wizén there are no short cuts and it takes him several years to complete a new collage. Nor is his working methodology linear. He often starts out with an image but does not complete the work. Things happen along the way – free associations and formal considerations force him into working with new images and he only returns to the original image after a lengthy interlude. In recent years Wizén has used a simple digital camera as a tool for distancing himself from the collage and thus being able to scrutinize it more closely. The camera enables him to enlarge details so that he can study the grey scale more closely and achieve a correct outcome with regard to the light and shadows that are central to his art.

His completed collages are often enlarged to a scale corresponding to the scale of the historical artwork from which the parts originate. For Wizén, this process of magnification contributes to making the final work expressive and physical – a room that one can enter. Wizén also finds something beautiful in the circular motion from the original work via its diminished reproduction in book form, which is the point of departure for the collage, and the return of the final image to a scale that relates to the historical work and its period.

Wizén’s long work on The Hunt, from his series entitled Quiet Battles, clarifies the process. Just as in the other works in the series, tiny details from paintings by Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) form the basis of this vast forest image. Wizén had long shown an interest in Uccello, notably in The Hunt in the Forest, painted in about 1470 and now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. But each time he saw the painting he felt disappointed at the stiff, geometrical landscape in a scene that seems totally to neutralize the violence of the hunt recorded in the foreground. Wizén had always imagined the painting differently and the work that he decided to create has more to do with his idea or conception of Uccello’s painting: a forest that corresponds to his recollection’s deep and hollow image – a place that is both beautiful and ominous. It is precisely the potential of this duality, the combination of beauty and disquiet, that drew Wizén to Uccello’s painting in the first place.

It took Wizén two years to construct the charged collage from a tiny detail extracted from a colour reproduction taken from a large number of copies of the second edition of John Pope-Hennessy’s Uccello monograph published in 1950. Initially the forest was only intended to function as the background to a merry-go-round, but when the collage had become overly detailed, Wizén realized the potential of the image and he abandoned his original idea. In order to bring the image to life he introduced shifts into the grass, strokes of golden blooms that rhythmically activate one’s gaze, drawing it deeper in among the trees. Wizén made use of the faulty colours and nuances found in different copies of the book to produce a living and varied image with the saturated atmosphere that he was looking for. He rapidly abandoned the original idea of a square picture when he realized that he needed to extend the sides in order to achieve the multiple-point perspective that he had intuitively constructed, but that is lacking in Uccello’s painting in which the huntsmen and animals in the foreground are deployed to create a dramatic (and art historically early) central perspective. Wizén was only able to complete his collage when he had succeeded in reaching the vanishing points of the perspective he needed to open up the image and give it the rhythm that induces the eye to lose itself among felled trees and bare tree trunks. Here, Uccello’s armed huntsmen have long since disappeared and the forest’s shimmering golden floor echoes with a beautiful but perturbing emptiness.

After completing The Hunt, Wizén started to work on his large labyrinth, Coil. The ground was constructed out of fragments from reproductions of Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano (c. 1456), while the walls consist of tiny pieces of wall from a small, now destroyed, fresco at a monastery outside Florence. Once again, the defective colour reproduction of the fresco in various books played an important part. An Italian first edition reproduced the fresco in intense pink flesh tones and this gave Wizén the variation and life in the image that he was looking for. As a subject, the labyrinth relates to esoteric medieval cathedral floors as well as to more or less pleasurable garden labyrinths. But, above all else, the labyrinth speaks of Wizén’s interest in horror movies, particularly Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The labyrinth, as a concept, appears at various levels in the film, from the winding road that leads up to the hotel where much of the film takes place, to the confusing arrangement of passages and rooms in the house and, ultimately, the fatal labyrinth in the garden.

The use of collage is associated with early modernism and, primarily, with Dadaist artists in Weimar Germany. In the same fashion as Wizén, the Dadaists combined fragments in order to create new meanings that could not readily be derived from the original contexts of these fragments. The Dadaist collages – mainly photo-collages – frequently present a violently fractured image with no specific centre. In this instance the seams are visible, leaving the underlying paper surface exposed between the image fragments. Art historian Rosalind Krauss describes the structure of avant-garde collage as syntax in which each fragment is experienced as a separate unit, like words in a phrase. The precondition for meaning in this link of one unit to another is the gaps or fissures, the spacing that separates the units. To Krauss, it is these spaces that rob the original photograph of its illusory sense of presence and make it clear that we are not looking at something that might be perceived as reality.

Note Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985, 105-107.

The opposite applies to Wizén’s use of collage which, just as with Max Ernst, is ultimately a matter of making invisible the gaps in-between and the reading of the new image as a convincing whole. While the Weimar collages in many cases communicate their radical message in a direct and immediate manner, the disruptive potential of Wizén’s collages lies, rather, in the convincing pictorial space in which all the perspectives are correct and light and shadow are consistent. In order to minimize visibility of the seams they are made with the utmost care. But when the collages are photographed and then enlarged, the flash illuminates the white seams and emphasizes what would otherwise be invisible. Accordingly, in an extremely time-consuming digital procedure, Wizén erases the seams between the thousands of fragments one by one in a high-resolution picture file, which forms the basis of the photograph that constitutes the final work.

It was while he was working on the first series, Reworkings, that Wizén realized that he would have to break up the larger pieces of the complete figures from paintings by Caravaggio (1571-1610) that he had previously made use of. In the series’ new constellations, the power hierarchies and the erotic charges dormant in Caravaggio’s images become manifest. In order to express the ambivalence Wizén sought in a forceful embrace at the centre of the grand, so-called Garden Scene (Untitled from the Reworkings series, 1998), a new technique was required. In the collage, which combines fragments from Amor Victorious, Judith Beheading Holofernes and the Conversion of Saint Paul, Wizén was obliged, for the first time, to rebuild a figure using even smaller fragments in order to construct an image that corresponded to the drama and dynamics of the internal picture that he was working from. Thus it was during the work with Reworkings – scenes filled with both lust and suppressed violence – that Wizén started to realize the possibilities inherent in his method.

This insight led him to his next series, Quiet Battles, in which all the material emanates from Uccello. Knights in armour take part in the silent battles of which the title speaks. But rather than taking place on vast battle fields, the action happens in smaller spaces, tableaux, which, in contrast to the masculinity and combat intimated by the armour, make one rather think of children’s games and puppet shows – indoor venues for a different type of clandestine combat. There is the subtlest balance between play and serious reality.

Wizén’s earlier works were facilitated by the fact that Caravaggio, almost without exception, lets the light fall in from the left. As soon as he started using materials from other artists, Wizén then had to adjust the lighting so that it remained consistent. The first image in the series was Horsemen & Knights in which the armour was constructed from reproductions of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. The checkered floor recurs in many of Wizén’s works and it alludes, on a poetic level, to the uncompromising and strict rules of chess and the floor in Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatically voyeuristic and erotic tableau Étant donnés (1946-66). Duchamp was, of course, an avid chess player. Here the floor has been constructed using fragments from a scene that Uccello painted for an altarpiece in Urbino. The black portal in the wall is not created as a compactly dark surface. It is subtly nuanced, like a mirror that needs cleaning or a dark glass that might possibly hide a beholder of the scene. The darkness reinforces the contrast with the rest of the wall, created in the collage from innumerable tiny pieces that spread out the light and produce an effect of sunset – the light of dusk that causes the room to glow.

The merry-go-round picture Spin combines playfulness and seriousness in the same way as several of the other works in Quiet Battles. Here, lance-holding knights are caught in a perpetual joust by the restricting movement of the merry-go-round – the children’s war games at the fairground. Just as in Horsemen & Knights, it is the treatment of the light striking the floor that activates the work. Once again, Wizén takes advantage of the flaws of his construction material: the poor quality of the reproductions. He paints with the varying nuances of the fragments, creating shifts from light to dark. A single one of the numerous little tiles that make up the floor in the picture can, in the collage, consist of some twenty different fragments. In the same way, the masonry walls are constructed so as to create a new perspective with the individual stones remade in order to achieve the right lines. In the green wall to the left in the image a small detail from the Urbino altarpiece has been repeated in absurdum. Even though Wizén makes use of the structure of Uccello’s paintings and his warped perspective to create the same level of realism as in the original images, we never find in Uccello what in Wizén’s work appear to be painterly qualities.

The colour version of the merry-go-round was preceded by a black-and-white image that was also called Spin. If the colour version is the fleshed out version, the monochrome represents the theory or map of the work, like a sketch in which Wizén investigates what really happens in this unexpected meeting of ideas. Here his long-standing interest in Uccello coincides with his interest in the encyclopaedia of Diderot and d’Alembert (1751-72), as well as his interest in the history of funfairs and merry-go-rounds. Wizén sees the simplified and lifeless horses in The Battle of San Romano as the wooden horses on a merry-go-round. In an apparently self-evident way he combines an image taken from an early twentieth-century catalogue of merry-go-rounds with an illustration from the encyclopaedia, which has been extended to create a perspectival room with a bright and lively surface. The machinery is simple and the seemingly natural relationship between upper and lower levels evokes invisible power structures and hidden hierarchies. White horses on the lower level contrast with black ones above in the same way that the darkness at the upper level corresponds to the light below, like photographic positive and negative images. At the same time, the picture conjures Wizén’s earliest encounter with Duchamp whose Oculist Witness, a detail from Duchamp’s The Large Glass, hung on his wall for many years in the form of a photographic work that Duchamp made with Richard Hamilton in 1968. If one simplifies the structure of Wizén’s Spin it looks like Duchamp’s piece. Conversely, the rings in Oculist Witness form a map of Wizén’s own picture. Contexts like these are seldom clear to him until long after he has completed an image.

Another key to the large, colour merry-go-round can be found in a later work, Top (2006). Just like the images in Quiet Battles, Top balances on the boundary between playfulness and gravity. Wizén collected most of the material from reproductions of Sandro Botticelli’s (1445-1510) map of Dante’s description of hell in his Divine Comedy. In Botticelli’s portrayal, Dante’s circles become a revolving cinematic journey, a narrative which, in the case of Wizén, is set in motion in a toy top. While children are playing at war on the large merry-go-round, here they are causing hell itself to spin.

The Hunt is a key work that steered Wizén to his on-going series, Subterranean, in which the subject recurs in another guise. The story from the production of the large forest repeated itself when Wizén again began to build a forest collage with the intention of using it as a background to two figures, this time from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland which, together with its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, form the starting point for the entire series. In working on two new collages over a five-year period, he unconsciously repeated the earlier process by, on both occasions, forsaking the foreground figures when the forests became all too detailed. Wizén found the material for Subterranean in reproductions of John Tenniel’s original drawings for the books from 1865 and 1871. Tenniel’s illustrations are flat, lacking any modulation of light and shadow. And there are only a few pictures containing trees in Tenniel’s (1820-1914) work. Tiny details from these drawings have to be repeated thousands of times in order to create a convincing forest of light and shade. The original motif is completely distorted but the shaky rhythm of Tenniel’s lines lives on, making the picture credible despite its having little connection with the original. In In Suspense the path progresses from the safety of the park into an anarchic wilderness. In Rapture, a paraphrase of The Hunt, the beholder is already surrounded by the dramatic landscape, like some sublime nineteenth-century picture of a forest which, in contrast to Tenniel’s somewhat desiccated images, opens up entirely new possibilities.

With Subterranean Wizén has sought to emphasize the uncanny qualities in Carroll’s text, and to charge the story with a new sort of ambivalence that can seem relevant to contemporary beholders. The series speculates about who Alice really was and whether she was actually Lewis Carroll’s alter ego. Beyond speculation as to Carroll’s desires or of the Alice narrative as an initiation rite, the question is posed as to whether the story may function as a sort of screen onto which a more bearable version of reality is projected. Wizén’s version does not illustrate the text as such but, rather, portrays something that words cannot readily describe.

The rooms that Alice inhabits are seething with emotions and an underlying – though not expressed – sensuality. In Spectral as well as in Spell, backgrounds and the grain of floorboards show the same type of mood-creating shadings that Wizén constructed in colour in Horsemen & Knights and in Spin. In the same manner as in the earlier works, his treatment of the light helps to intensify the character of the rooms. In Spectral Alice is shown on a sort of stage (a room within a room as in many of Wizén’s pictures). The light is concentrated like spotlights in a theatre and among the floor’s shadows the overturned furniture shows traces of a fight. The placement of the chairs reinforces the central perspective and it links the image to the huntsmen and their quarry in Uccello’s forest scene.

Spell shows Alice in a doll’s house (yet another room within a room) and Wizén questions what is going on in the house where she finds herself after falling down the rabbit hole. Alice is not portrayed as a victim – here she is the active element and instead of being under a spell, as in Carroll’s narrative, the image seems to imply that it is Alice herself who is casting the spell. At the centre of the picture is the ambiguous hand that shifts back and forth between two possible figures: Alice’s fingers or the bouncy legs of a doll wearing a short dress. This dual reading resembles Wizén’s artistic process where, in active interplay between form and content, the repetitive work of assembling fragments into an image constantly offers new and unexpected encounters, which help to develop and intensify his original idea. The process leads Wizén into new pictorial realms where familiar things become mysterious and where each new image reflects aspects of all previous images.

Text: Patrick Amsellem

Subterranean I

2012, Stene Projects, Stockholm

Detaljrika verk kräver tid

Ett konstverk kan insistera på sin egen betydelse med olika medel. Det kan högljutt beröra Ett Viktigt Ämne eller så kan ett sofistikerat anslag ange graden av seriositet. I Per Wizens fall avslöjar den tidskrävande tillverkningsmetoden bildens angelägenhet.
Per Wizen arbetar med collage där konsthistoriskt välkända verk arrangeras om och ges nya innebörder. Men konstverken är inte resultatet av ett flitigt photoshopande. Wizens redskap är analoga; han frilägger med skalpell och sammanfogar med klister. Först därefter tar digitala skannrar över och printrar över .
Skillnaden mot att jobba helt digitalt är inte omedelbart uppenbar , men ändå tydlig för den som granskar Per Wizens verk närmare. Övergångarna och sammanfogningarna röjer nyansskillnader som troligen vore omöjliga att uppnå med digital teknik.
När Wizen utgick från konsthistoriska stjärnor som Caravaggio och Uccello kunde själva tekniken försvinna bakom de nya anslående motiven. Men när konstnären nu istället utgår från Sir John Tenniels originalillustrationer till ” Alice i Underlandet” blir utförandet en tydligare del av verket.
På Stene Projects möter ett ännu inte helt färdigställt svart-vitt collage, suggestivt redovisat mellan glasskivor som hänger ifrån taket. Här blir tekniken synlig genom att vi tillåts se verkets baksida med myriader av småbitar och kan kontrastera detta mot den resulterande skogen på framsidan.
Att kunna förstå den omfattande arbetsinsatsen ger en närmast fysisk upplevelse av verket, samtidigt som det tilltalar ett intellektuellt reflekterande över bildens mening. Den skog som annars skulle bli just en uppförstorad( om än förändrad bild fån 1800-talet, berättar nu istället om motivets relation till Alice resa i underjorden med all dess parallellitet till det omedvetna .
Att som konstnär redogöra för den tidskrävande processen är att också formulera ett krav till betraktaren: ta dig god tid när du tittar på konsten. Det är den väl värd .

Håkan Nilsson, Recension i Svenska Dagbladet

Barbro Bäckströms Stipendiatutställning

2009, Malmö Art Museum, Malmö 

Spiralling

2008, Brändström & Stene Gallery, Stockholm in focus. Gallery Ping Pong, Malmö

Quiet Battles

2006, Brändström & Stene, Stockholm

Mycket kan sägas om arvet efter den postmoderna eran, speciellt i tider när det blivit comme il faut att hylla historielösheten. Men det finns likväl postmoderna ränder som aldrig riktigt går ur. Och väl är kanske det. Förmågan att laborera med parallella synvinklar eller blickar på konsthistorien är ett exempel, måhända det bästa. Att läsa om konsthistorien på ett nytt sätt är ändå inte särskilt märkvärdigt. Det har människor gjort i alla tider. Men att tränga ner i konsthistorien och placera sig som en samtida bland konstnärerna, men utrustad med ett annat seende, det kan få gnistorna att flyga. Av naturliga skäl har detta förnyade insiderseende kommit att bli ett effektivt vapen i händerna på delar av befolkningen vars synvinkel på verkligheten tidigare negligerats eller förtryckts. En stor del av den genusrelaterade konsten har med framgång valt denna strategi, och därmed kunnat avtäcka konturerna hos patriarkatets förment ”objektiva” version av historien. Metoden har också framgångsrikt använts av konstnärer som arbetar med en queer-problematik. En pionjärgärning på detta område har utförts av Matts Leiderstam, som via klassiska konstnärer som Nicolas Poussin påvisat underströmmar i våra bildvärldar – i detta fall homoerotiska – som vanligtvis sopats under mattan.

Per Wizén började i slutet av 90-talet att ”dekonstruera” målningar från främst den italienska renässansen genom att klippa sönder reproduktioner och omsorgsfullt foga ihop bitarna till väldiga collage. I Wizéns händer blev de kliniskt välkomponerade och subtilt symbolbehängda bilderna plötsligt vibrerande av uppdämd åtrå och en farlig närhet till de allra mest förbjudna lustarna. Inte underligt att Wizéns bilder vandaliserades av högerextremistiska huliganer på Rooseum 2003, när han visade dem i en samlingsutställning med det träffande namnet ”De bortbjudna”. Denna slags reaktion brukar inte vara resultatet av någon djupare analys, men frågan är om vandalerna någonstans i sina förvirrade hjärnor ändå fattat något av sprängstoffet i Wizéns bilder. Han visar oss nämligen en version av verkligheten och kulturarvet som brukar resultera i moralpanik så fort man snuddar vid ämnet. Wizéns iscensättningar av situationer som involverar treenigheten erotik-våld-död är politiskt inkorrekta i sig så det förslår, och har närmar sig sitt ämne med en inlevelse som förmedlar budskapet att detta är något betydligt allvarligare menat än ett lite försenat, postmodernt spel med förlagor och identiteter.

I sin nya utställning hos Brändström & Stene har Wizén använt sig av katalogbilder av målningar av Uccello, som han i vanlig ordning klippt och klistrat ihop till nya bilder. Den verklighet han ger oss inblick i är arrangerad i ett smått klaustrofobiskt tittskåpsformat, där det svartvitrutiga golvet tycks suga betraktaren in i bildens mitt, ett symboliskt svart hål som hotar att sluka allt och alla. Per Wizén fungerar som regissör i denna värld, en suverän härskare med makten att låta människorna agera på en scen som han själv har fullständig kontroll över. I en av bilderna är ett antal riddare inbegripna i en strid på liv och död, men det är ingen gloriös bataljscen Wizén förevisar. Snarare är det resultatet av en meningslös slakt, där människospillrorna ligger utströdda på det smutsiga golvet. Även i en annan av utställningens verk, ”Intermission”, möter vi två personer kort efter det att dramatiken har lagt sig. De två halvnakna männen i bildrummet bär delar av riddarrustningar, och åtminstone en av dem förefaller att vara sårad. Samtidigt ångar bilden av sexualitet, och ju längre man betraktar den, desto tydligare blir det att det är en postcoital situation vi bevittnar.

Alla Wizéns personer delar det gemensamma ödet att vara lekdockor i händerna på en högre makt, vilket får sin yttersta manifestation i verket ”Puppet Master”. I detta verk har själva bildrummet försetts med ytterligare ett rum i rummet, en teaterscen på vilken en vuxen man manövrerar ett barn med händerna. Situationen hade kunnat vara ett uttryck för intimitet eller till och med kärleksfullhet, men Wizén har genom sitt arrangemang skapat ett sceneri som snarare pekar i riktning mot kylig ritualisering, underkastelse och ett latent hot som bara väntar på att utlösas likt en sexuell eruption. Alla kusligast i detta avseende är emellertid den jaktscen i vilken Wizén plockat bort såväl jägare som villebråd och i stället lämnat den tomma och mörka skogen öppen inför våra ögon. Man erinrar sig förstås inledningen av Dantes ”Divina Commedia”, där huvudpersonen plötsligt befinner sig ensam i syndens mörka skog utan att kunna hitta den rätta vägen. I Wizéns bild ”The Hunt” formerar sig de nakna träden som en anfallande armé, och mörkret faller i bakgrunden som en svart ridå. ”The Hunt” har goda förutsättningar att inta positionen som en av den svenska samtidskonstens mest otäcka bilder, onekligen en bedrift i sig. Men Per Wizén nöjer sig minst av allt med att kokettera med sin estetiska fingertoppskänsla för vilka strängar som klingar med störst dissonans i vårt medvetande. Skogen i ”The Hunt” är, som hos Dante, urbilden av den existentiella avgrunden, den intighet som ligger på lur så fort människan låter det etiska fördämningssystemet genombrytas av mörkrets rännilar.

Per Wizén är en konstnär som drivs av en övertygelse som inbegriper både ämnesvalet och det tekniska utförandet. Ibland leker han – med eller mot sin vilja – med homoerotiska stereotyper som i en annan konstnärs händer lätt hade kunnat förfalla till maner. Den genuint livsfilosofiska svärta som häftar vid hans bilder gör dock att hans konst fortsätter att fascinera, trots att inga omvälvningar av det mer dramatiska slaget dragit genom hans konstnärskap under de senaste åren.

Text: Anders Olofsson

But Across

1999, Kabinetten van de Vleeshal, Middelburg [NL]

Reworkings

1998, Gallery Wallner, Malmö

Med våld och Sexualitet i fokus

Konsten blir hos Per Wizen något väsentligt, något mer än bara pynt och status. Hans bilder visar att konsten inte är någonting som står utanför en diskussion om moral och etik.
Förförarens hand är också förgörarens. Smekningen kan vara det grövsta av våld, som kuvar och formar, deformerar och krossar föremålet för sitt begär.
Handen på bilden har naglar som klor. Den vilar i oroande närhet av pojkens kön. Det är svårt att avgöra om pojken verkligen ler eller om han grimaserar av smärta och obehag. Mannens röda klädnad faller i tunga veck, under pojken och över hans ben ligger en vit duk eller ett lakan slängt. Man kan inte se om pojken sitter på en säng, ett bord eller kanske en balustrad. Placeringen gör emellertid att man lätt kommer att tänka på en helt annan tradition inom konsten än figurmåleriet, nämligen stillebenmåleriet. Pojken är ett objekt för begär och konsumtion: kopplingen bidrar till det djupa och tvetydiga obehaget i bilden.
Per Wizens bilder på Galleri Wallnerser ut som klassiskt måleri, noga taget är de alla uppbyggda som collage av figurer och detaljer från 1600-talsmålaren Caravaggios arbeten , avfotograferade och sedan uppförstorade.
Fyllbulten, bråkstaken och möjligen också dråparenCaravaggios målningar var provocerande för sin egen framtid genom deras realistiska och våldsamma sätt att närma sig klassiska och bibliska motiv, och de var med sina dramatiska kompositioner och spel med starka lokalfärger och ljuskontraster med om att forma barockmåleri långt utanför Italien. Bland hans verk finns målningar som” Matei kallelse”, iscensatt av ljusdunkket i en samtida romersk taverna, och ” Segrande Cupido”, som inte avviker från klassisk tradition genom sin nakenhet men väl genom sin utmanande frontalitet och fokuseringen på könet.
Flera av Per Wizens bilder utgår ifrån denna Cupido, på olika sätt fragmenterad och placerad i sammanhang där hans säkra och självcentrerade pose och minspel förskjuts mot sårbarhet och utsatthet. Ingenting i bilderna är egentligen främmande i Caravaggios måleri, ljuset , koloriten och ofta också de högdramatiska kompositionerna är vad man en gång i tiden kallade carravaggesque.
Men hos Per Wizen är det mesta av klassisk och biblisk mytologi bortblåst. Gestalterna är istället indragna i nyare och öppnare berättelser fokuserade på våld och sexualitet .Böst menar jag att bilderna fungerar när de har karaktären av fragment, utsnitt av större målningar, och då rum , ljus och kompositioner är trovärdiga. Där är både ovissheten och laddningen störst. Men samtidigt ger de större bilderna nycklar både till förståelsen och metoden och till den stora dramatiken hos Caravaggio själv.
Utöver den sexuella tvetydigheten hos de agerande finns det en ytterligare ambivalens i Per Wizens bilder, den mellan betraktarens möjliga igenkännande i offrets situation, där blicken är präglad av empati, och det också lika oundvikliga i igenkännandet med förövarens blick, styrd av destruktivt begär. Den gränsen löper genom varje betraktare och gör att ingen av bilderna kan undandras sig ett starkt obehag.. Var någonstans dom konstnärens ansvar upphör och betraktarens tar vid är en annan gräns som är långt mer än bara en filosofisk spetsfundighet.
Men vad som gör Per Wizens bilder brännande intressanta är att de visar att konsten inte är någonting som står utanför en diskussion om moral och etik;också dessa gränser är en del av, om inte konstbegreppet, så väl av det upplevelsefält där konsten blir något väsentligt, någonting mer än bara pynt och status.

Text: Pontus Kyander, Recension i Sydsvenska Dagbladet

The Romantic Eye

2024-25, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Diversity United

2021-22, Tretyakov Gallery, Moskva. Tempelhof, Berlin

Underjorden

2022, Amos Rex, Finland

Liljevalchs Vårsalong

2022, Liljevalchs konsthall , Stockholm 

Untitled (From the series Reworkings)

2009, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Entre Acte

2009, Kukje Gallery, Sydkorea

Against Time/ Mot Tiden

2007, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm 

Kroppen. Konst och Vetenskap

2005, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 

Ett nutida objekt som också tydligt refererar till bekanta bilder av kroppen och samtidigt framstår som något nytt och främmande är Per Wizéns lilla vaxsnurra från 1998, Utan titel (Spinning Top). En manskropp tycks ha roterat sig själv till formen av ett barns leksakssnurra. Man kan nästan ana de pulserande organen därinne, under håren, huden och blodkärlen. Snurran blir som den vuxnes minnen av barndomen, burna av hans kropp, och en leksak på samma gång. Snurrans form är given av dess rörelsemöjlighet. En roterande rörelse som har en hypnotisk, sövande dragningskraft, som sluter sig i sig själv. Wizéns snurra kan ses som en sovande kropp. Eller en kropp som slutit sig i sig själv. Den har stängt alla sinnesorgan utom huden, detta blinda, döva, stumma organ som måste sättas i rörelse eller beröras för att fungera. Det som vi använder för våra mest intima kommunikationer som vuxna, men som också i så hög grad tillhör barnets värld. Känsligheten för beröring understryks genom de rodnande topparna, svåra att inte se som bröstvårtor. Samtidigt som den rodnande ytterkanten understryker rotationen. Det är som om blodet har rusat utåt av hastigheten. Den hastiga rörelse, eller flykt, som kanske hjälper oss att glömma alla förluster. Den franske filosofen Paul Virilio skriver i Försvinnandets estetik: "Pa barnkalas används ofta hastiga vändningar, snurrningar och störningar av jämvikten.

Svindel och omtumlande känslor eftersträvas som en källa till lust."

Hastigheten har något lustfyllt över sig och lösgör oss frän den tröga tiden.

Handlar det också om att lösgöra oss frän köttets sorg i en strävan etter något utomkroppsligt? Wizéns verk koncentrerar olika kroppsliga och mentala erfarenheter på ett både vemodigt och sinistert sätt.

Text: Måns Holst-Ekström