Paul Fägerskiöld »Silent Spring«

Fägerskiöld’s most recent work on view in the exhibition consists of grainy monochromatic canvases. Made with acrylic paint from aerosol cans using a dripping and spitting technique the resulting images are floating colour fields, dispersing towards their edges and eschewing clearly defined borders. A small fraction of the naked canvas, halted by the crop of a simple wooden frame, remains exposed towards its extremities giving the field an appearance of weightlessness in the process. Seemingly devoid of structure or legible hierarchy, the free-flowing images break down upon closer inspection revealing layer upon layer of contrasting hues in a myriad of colour specks, the crystalizing dots simply buzzing around ones field of vision.

The visual fields appear fragile in presence, their ambivalent colours seemingly evading linguistic definition as they fluctuate between divergent points of the colour-spectrum. The colour fields are susceptible to external factors such as light and surrounding space, demanding a direct engagement from the viewer as they take varying amounts of distance to break down. Indeed, colour here takes on a communicative role as pre-language as the optical qualities of the paintings become dependant on the viewer’s interaction. Perception works as action; how the paintings look depends on what you do.

Conversely, the paintings from the body of work entitled „White Flag“ are defined by semiotic observation rather than optical persuasion. White Flag (Federated Malay States) 2013, on view in the upstairs space, reproduces the banner of a dissolved national or regional entity–in this case what used to be a federation of four protected states in the Malay peninsula under British colonial rule- in monochrome white paint. The rendered images in this body of work, all examples of failed or expired political and geographical demarcations, are stripped of their colour, leaving but the texture and materiality of the paint on the canvas as their apparent subject matter. Through the exclusion of colour crucial information is omitted from their iconography, suggesting that the flags might now have been divested of all political agency and remind the viewer that colonisation, national borders, and linguistic differences are constantly changing.

Paul Fägerskiöld was born in 1982 and currently lives and works in New York and Stockholm. In 2013 he was awarded the Fredrik Roos Art Grant and had a solo-exhibition at Moderna Museet, Malmö. In 2010 he was awarded the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation award, which included an exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall. He was educated at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm and at the Academy of Fines Arts in Vienna. In the summer 2010 he participated in the project Another Way, a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and Wanås in Skåne.