Stieg Pers­son

In its cur­rent usage the word ​“enthu­si­asm” sim­ply means a live­ly inter­est. It has how­ev­er a lost ancient and archa­ic mean­ing, that of inspi­ra­tion by a divine mad­ness. When dis­cussing the artis­tic imag­i­na­tion and the ori­gins of the art­work, Eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry ratio­nal­ism removed the divine and sub­sti­tut­ed the mind, but a mind sus­pend­ed of its usu­al oper­a­tions, enflamed and under the spell of three fun­da­men­tal aspects of enthu­si­asm: obses­sion, excite­ment and trans­port. It is in that spir­it that these paint­ings have been made.

A range of meth­ods and styles coex­ist in this instal­la­tion. There are libid­i­nal abstrac­tions, forms swelling and pro­trud­ing, images in the act of becom­ing. Some fuse abstrac­tion with a col­lec­tion of small real­ist ele­ments, shapes evolve and radi­ate from a still life of a pearl, flow­ers sprout from street tag­gings. Our under­stand­ing of the tra­di­tion­al is dis­solved, Cul­ture is nat­u­ralised, nature is cultured.

Stieg Pers­son