Stieg Pers­son
His­to­ry Painting

Stieg Persson’s new work con­sid­ers the moral dimen­sion of paint­ing. The works tack­le some of the eth­i­cal conun­drums of our time by com­mu­ni­cat­ing cer­tain atti­tudes to con­tem­po­rary events. These works eschew post­mod­ernist irony, or appro­pri­at­ed imagery and seek, instead, to express out­rage, sor­row and a sense of perversity.

Persson’s paint­ings pos­sess an abstract poise, ten­der pas­sages, strong com­po­si­tions and dynam­ic forms. For­mal­ly, they are cap­ti­vat­ing works and, as such, reveal their debt to the strin­gent flat­ness and com­po­si­tion­al log­ic of Colour­field paint­ing. Except, they are most­ly black � blue black, brown black, grey black, cool and warm. When they are not black, the paint­ings con­tain sien­na, umber, red ochre, mush­room grey and cream — sub­dued colours that shift with changes in light. The artist’s use of black com­mu­ni­cates themes of memo­r­i­al, loss and the inex­plic­a­ble side of our sub-con­scious. Black can also sug­gest a kind of emp­ty­ing out, the lack of light, the dark­ness of night or of the mind.

Since the ear­ly 1980s, Stieg Pers­son has been inter­est­ed in what he calls the ​‘almost com­mu­ni­ca­tion’ of paint­ing. Text in Persson’s paint­ings is large­ly inde­ci­pher­able, either because it is in a goth­ic script, or the words them­selves make no sense, com­mu­ni­cat­ing, most recent­ly, in the mode of those mis­spelt spam emails that try to get past var­i­ous fil­ters, for exam­ple, vjja­gra (sic). Persson’s ear­li­er use of the abstract arabesque also ref­er­ences writ­ing, with­out actu­al­ly depict­ing lan­guage. These flour­ish­es of white curlicues are like an elab­o­rate script that has been frozen in a state of unfurled tran­quil­i­ty. The artist’s use of text comes to be a metaphor for the act of paint­ing itself. On one hand, paint­ing com­mu­ni­cates through its own build­ing blocks colour, form, tex­ture, com­po­si­tion, image. On the oth­er hand, paint­ing’s inter­nal log­ic, which iron­i­cal­ly is made up of these very same ele­ments, cre­ates a suite of visu­al rela­tion­ships that can be con­tra­dic­to­ry, open to mul­ti­ple inter­pre­ta­tions, or can fold in on them­selves, sealed in silence. This is the ​‘almost com­mu­ni­ca­tion’ of paint­ing, that so encour­ages this artist to keep paint­ing. After twen­ty years, we can eas­i­ly recog­nise both the lan­guage and tem­pera­ment of Persson’s works — they dis­solve the mod­ernist par­a­digm while at the same time extend­ing its for­mal strengths.

- Excerpts from Vic­to­ria Lynn, His­to­ry Paint­ing, in Stieg Pers­son (ed), His­to­ry Paint­ing, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Mel­bourne, 2006