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MALIN PERSSON – ABSTRACT SKYSCAPES

As almost anything but a painter, when I enter Malin Persson’s studio I am a little off base and feel somewhat out of my league. She works with a flat medium confined within borders and edges. A field where composition is unavoidable and colors can make or break the mood. In short, it is a medium that forces the artist to confront my worst fears in art making.

I always tell people to rely on their own experience and play with the thoughts, feelings, and ideas that come to mind when looking at my work, so this is the place I start. Where else can I?

What strikes me first is the pallet that she uses. Muted tones of what could be more vivid colors, they remind me of a walk in the late-autumn New England woods after a rain and the past-prime colors of the fallen leaves. There is something impressive about these colors as they seem unnatural, but at their base they feel 100% organic: connected to the raw earth from which they sprung.

This deep-rooted connection to nature and the elements is the foundation of Malin’s painting. It can be felt everywhere, from her most geometric composition to her pictorial watercolors. She is clearly a painter of and in the natural world.

Painting is a medium of light where each stroke controls and edits the incoming light, reflecting only the desired hue and saturation. In this way all painting makes light into a tangible medium, but Malin’s work goes further by depicting only the light in a pure sky. The invisible elements of light and air become manifest in a ocean of fading colors and diffuse light. Despite this diffuse, fading nature, there is a sense of crispness brought on by the sharp horizons. This suggests a high, cold sky, with moisture lingering far above, unable to obscure the sharp outline of the land below.

I first met Malin when she was painting Scandinavian horizons and skies. The work had a dream-like quality as the light came from just behind the horizon. Whether pre-dawn or post-dusk, the sense of time was one of quiet transition. Quiet though it was, there was still a sense of grandeur and the foreboding power of a vast nature. We, the viewers, were left isolated in the midst of it all, appreciating a quiet, still retreat.

Suddenly, a few months later, there appeared strict geometry and paintings on glass. Gone were the dreamy fading skies and the clear, tree-lined horizons. Something, though, remained from this profound sense of nature: the palette and an organic treatment of the geometry.

Despite the strong presence of geometry in Malin’s current work, it is clearly not the precise, hyper-rational geometry of Euclid or science in general. Although our minds might be tempted to oversimplify her work by projecting straight lines, parallels, and equilateral polygons, it does not take much to realize this mistake. Lines crossing from one edge of the canvas to the other bow under the weight of gravity and clearly intersect one another at a multitude of distant points. These lines are not about geometry in a strict sense; they lie closer to handcrafts such as stained glass. In short, Malin’s geometry is alive, pulsing with the life of the hand that made it and the nature in which it is situated.

The connection to stained glass can also be found in her titles, for Malin often describes her work as “windows”. But from where do they look? and to where? The earthy tones suggest comfort in the midst of nature, a log cabin or other form of cozy retreat. Something built with loving care and attention to detail in an organic way: a true Scandinavian sensibility clearly present in Malin’s paintings despite her years living away from her Scandinavian roots. Perhaps, relying only on her memories of these surroundings, the colors have grown richer and more concentrated with this organic sensibility.

SUPERSYMMETRY

In the world of physics, symmetry is approached as a kind of interchangeability between dimensions or elements. Classical, left-right symmetry exists when the left side of a figure can be replaced by the right side without noticeable difference. A circle is infinitely symmetric because no matter how you flip or rotate it it still looks the same. Our experience of time, on the other hand, is not symmetric because we only experience it moving in one direction: we will never see shards of glass spontaneously reassemble and pop back into the window from where they came.

Malin’s work contains a mysterious symmetry of space and time that speaks of a balance of forces human, natural, and universal. The result is to relocate human artifacts to their home within natural phenomena. Skies lit from just beyond multiple horizons suggest a dawn-dusk symmetry leaving us suspended, in this transition, somewhere between the two. (Are we moving towards or from darkness?) Whether the beginning or end of the day or night, there is a sense that it is the transition that matters more than its context.

This suspension in time connects directly to a suspension in space for in many works our vantage point is left ambiguous. Investigating the perspective within her work it is unclear whether we stand on a large flat plane, a hill-side, a mountaintop, or even perhaps above the earth and atmosphere itself. Once again, instead of creating a sense of uneasiness, I find myself enjoying the meditative stillness of these suspensions.

As abstract landscapes, they also display a vertical symmetry as it can be unclear where the top and bottom of the canvas reside. In one of my most favorite canvases, equally dark bands can be found on both the top and bottom edge of the frame. Unlike the boarders she has used in previous work, these bands bleed into the sky. By changing your orientation, it is clear that each one of these bands could be a horizon, leaving the rest sky. Perhaps the darkness at the top of the canvas is a dark band of clouds, or perhaps Malin has compressed the entire sky, from horizon to horizon, into one frame. In this way there is a spatial symmetry relating to up and down. Again this interchangeability leaves me suspended, tumbling continuously with an alternating vertical. Much like the diamonds hovering comfortably in her abstract skies, we, the viewers, hover in front of her canvasses infused with the glowing light of transition.

Even the diamonds have a sense of a cultural-temporal symmetry as they feel reminiscent of 80’s retro pop, but seamlessly inhabit an organic, quaint terrain. Instead of standing as elements of a technical phantasmagoria with florescent colors, hard edges, and strict geometry far from the “natural” order, Malin’s 80’s pop elements rest peacefully within nature, bridging the gap between human artifacts and the “organic.” Visions of Björk and other pop Scandinavian icons come to mind for they also seem to meld a sense of organic handcraft directly in tune with nature with contemporary, hard, technical elements which have grown out of a so-called “mastery” of this natural order. What is it about the Scandinavians that allows them to simultaneously feel at home and at peace with these two, apparently opposing, forces?

Speaking of the diamonds makes me realize yet another symmetry that pulls me to these paintings… a symmetry of depth between foreground and background for the edges of her four-sided figures, as mentioned before, are not parallel, forcing strange perspectives. This gives these elements a certain life and motion: a pulsing vibration as they seem to flip-flop back and forth along each axis in space. They do not shimmer with reflected light, but instead with their unstable, physical orientation.

This effect is most dramatic in her fields of diamonds which fill the canvases for instead of occupying the flat space of the canvas, these planes lift and sink in and out of the plane in a oscillating wave-like manner. Again, a certain equivalence is drawn between the near and far, a depth oriented symmetry of sorts.

THE MYSTERY OF DISPLACED SKY

In her most recent work, fragments of the sky are found occupying the dark land-mass below the glowing sky. Somehow, through construct or optical illusion, hard-edged rectangles of sky sit, stand, or float below the sharp horizon. I am left puzzled by these elements searching for a way that they fit. Perhaps a billboard of sky amidst the landscape (something reminiscent of the work of Sema, a mutual colleague of Malin and I). But somehow this does not fit, for the lighting and physicality of the hard-edged sky element do not coincide with this possibility.

Perhaps it is not the sky that is occupying the land, but the land that has been removed to reveal the sky? Somehow this element provides a view through the earth to the sky below and beyond the horizon. But instead of encountering the source of the glowing sky we encounter more slowly-fading sky as if this bleeding light had no source and simply continued forever.

Then I remember that there is one place I recently encountered hard-edge fragments of the sky amidst solid landscape. It was on a trip to southern France to visit the largest solar furnace in the world. This is a place all about sky where, through reflected sunlight, they are able to generate temperatures up to 3000o C in order to study the way materials react under such extreme heat stress. But considering the installation as a monument or aesthetic work is at least as impressive as its technical purpose, for the facility is comprised of 63 square mirrors in a hill-side field directly in front of a 40meter-high concave parabaloid mirror capable of focusing the sun’s energy to a point. (Anish Kapoor eat your heart out!) The flat mirrors (heleostats), which follow the motion of the sun much like sunflowers, end up composing crisp, hard-edged reflections of the sky amidst the mountainous landscape, much like those found in Malin’s paintings. Perhaps these rectangles of sky are simply the reflected image in a mirror occupying the landmass? … Then again they might just be abstract compositions.

PROCESS

As one artist to another, her process is still a mystery to me. How does anybody daily confront the most dangerous issues of art-making -- composition, color, and image-making -- and live to tell the tail?

In some of her canvases, Malin merges the landscapes of her earlier work with the geometrical shift that took place within the last two years. By inspecting the layers of paint it is clear that the landscape elements are painted first. How then, does one step forward, paintbrush in hand, and make the mark that ruptures the composition? Where should it go? What color should it be? What are its proper dimensions? These are the questions I ask her as I struggle to understand her and her work.

After speaking about these issues for a while a tool emerges. Now this is something I, a former engineer, can understand; a tool! Of course! Small, though it may be, Malin produces a piece of glass with lines painted on it. Although it started as an early experiment in her artistic research, it has become a trusted companion, helping her through those decisive moments before the brush meets canvas.

What Malin has created here is a literal, hand-held window that she looks through at the painting before her. It is a simple procedure of superposition, overlaying the stripes on the composition in a freely manipulated way. No commitments necessary here, just a preview of the possibilities: a casual dating period before vows are taken.

While this may not seem like much to write home about, for me, it is an opening into her work for it shows me that there is something in her process that I can easily relate to. The activity of painting is not a 100% intuitive, unexplainable, a divine connection between Malin and her canvas, but the work of another human-being struggling to express herself and reveal the composition locked somewhere in the unconscious.

This reminds me of my first moment of connection with the work of Michelangelo. No matter what historians say, the greatest work of the master lies hidden in the sepulchral chamber below Michelangelo's New Sacristy in Florence, accessible only if you read the small print at the ticket both and buy the special ticket. It is here that you’ll encounter the humanity behind unfathomable technique, for in this small room are the gestural sketches of the man, in charcoal, upon the bare wall. Far from the perfectly rendered forms that he is celebrated for, these marks look much like those found in most figure-drawing classes. Skilled no doubt, but loose, flowing, and leaving those tricky bits, the head and hands, as circles or blobs to be dealt with later. Place holders in the mean-time. Now that I’ve seen the human struggle and commitment I can approach the masterpieces with new eyes.

I am happy about my discovery of Malin’s tool for I find her looking through windows of her own creation in order to compose new windows on the emerging canvas. Unlike some, who would resort to digital methods, Malin remains in the here and now as she navigates her process.

These clues and insights into one level of her process led me to sit and write in her studio as she worked so that I might try to uncover other clues behind the work itself. As a first impression, I immediately had to realize the time commitment of her work, for in an afternoon I was only able to see her start to prepare two canvases. While this is a small fraction of her overall process I was still able to note something of this beginning which stays present in the final composition: a sense of water, flow, and multiple orientations/symmetries as mentioned above.

Between typing, thinking, and reading I noticed Malin playing on the floor with a white canvas occupied by one deep-pink band at one edge. When next I looked up she was holding the canvas vertical with one hand as the pink started in drip and bleed down the face of the canvas. The other hand held a spray bottle that was misting the canvas such that the color bled. At moments the water spray pushed ink, spreading the color through the space, and at times the spray pushed water, removing color. Soon after multiple flips of the canvas including diagonal orientations, the canvas was laid flat so that the water and color could seep into the surface, immobilizing a specific moment in her choreography.

As mentioned before, this initial process of water, ink, and multiple orientations speaks through the finished work in the form of organic sensibilities and super-symmetries.

Water is clearly a powerful element in the construction and effect of these works and so the possibility of lakes and other bodies of water within the landscape arises. This is part of the confusion of multiple horizons for we are left uncertain weather the lowest horizon is the actual barrier between land and sky, with dark clouds above, or if it is merely the edge of the next hill, with a reflecting body of water and far bank beyond. Again, the composition seems to flutter with these multiple possibilities of perspective and orientation. Like a winged creature, this fluttering gives flight to viewer and the work itsel