Stieg Pers­son
Cryp­sis

Anna Schwartz Gallery is con­sumed by Daz­zle. A form of cam­ou­flage orig­i­nal­ly used on British bat­tle­ships dur­ing the First World War, invis­i­bil­i­ty was not the inten­tion. Rather, Daz­zle was employed to con­fuse the per­cep­tion of its view­ers. Stieg Pers­son con­structs an elab­o­rate visu­al rela­tion­ship between his work and its envi­ron­ment by uti­liz­ing the same tech­nique, encour­ag­ing us to look again, and look hard.

Sev­er­al large-scale paint­ings vie for atten­tion against a high­ly pat­terned back­ground. Emerg­ing from strik­ing geom­e­try, the paint­ings con­vey a com­pelling fusion of flat, hard-edged colour and intri­cate dec­o­ra­tion. Whip-like scrolls unfurl amidst archa­ic sym­bols of comets and rat kings. Writ­ing is inti­mat­ed by shell pink curlicues and inky, inscrutable scripts. The artist’s sig­na­ture forms lie entan­gled. These aes­thet­ic propo­si­tions artic­u­late a sub­tle sense of unease also evi­dent in the works’ pre­mon­i­to­ry titles. The artist exam­ines the cul­tur­al impli­ca­tions of pirat­ed video in ​‘Is my video viral?’ and the demise of the Y chro­mo­some in ​‘Frag­ile Y’s’.

Cryp­sis pro­vides an are­na in which a com­plex body of themes is explored. For Pers­son, the paint­ings ​‘express a need for the world to mean some­thing’, a quest for mean­ing typ­i­cal of the artist’s ongo­ing dis­course with the very nature of painting.