Stieg Pers­son
Black Swans

In this exhi­bi­tion, paint­ings of black swans artic­u­late the dilem­mas of cre­ativ­i­ty using quotes from numer­ous sources rang­ing from weighty lit­er­ary voic­es to invest­ment brochures.

A visu­al quote of Jan Asseli­jn’s Threat­ened Swan, 1650, quotes ​‘Mac­beth’: ​“O hor­ror, hor­ror, hor­ror! Tongue nor heart can­not con­ceive nor name thee!” whilst a quote of Jan Weenix’s Dead Swan, 1716, is from Aristo­phanes: ​“Quick­ly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say some­thing clever.” In this case, not dead but dead drunk.

These swans func­tion as alle­gories of cre­ativ­i­ty, as they do of the con­cept of the Black Swan event; that unpre­dictable, par­a­digm-shift­ing occur­rence that changes every­thing.

Var­i­ous aspects of cre­ativ­i­ty are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­cealed and revealed. Aristo­phanes’ call for wine to ​“wet the mind” rep­re­sents the delib­er­ate cul­ti­va­tion of con­di­tions that might sum­mon the unex­pect­ed cre­ative leap, a divine intox­i­ca­tion, whilst Shake­speare’s cry of ​“hor­ror, hor­ror, hor­ror!” cap­tures the moment when cre­ativ­i­ty encoun­ters some­thing so unprece­dent­ed that lan­guage itself fails.

All the paint­ings illus­trate the same dilem­ma: when the prob­lems of cre­ativ­i­ty become the sub­ject itself. This exhi­bi­tion is about cre­ativ­i­ty emerg­ing from appar­ent empti­ness or ​‘men­tal block’; art com­ing not from hav­ing ideas but from sur­ren­der­ing the need to have them.