In his outstanding book about Edgar Degas, Paul Valéry asks himself: Mais comment parler peinture? In a more loosley constructed English: But how can one speak of painting? Painting, this precise, visual and tactile language of the eye and the hand, that we attempt to translate into vague words, words that often seem rather arbitrary. But actually, that is where the very freedom om words lies. You cannot test them against a particular painting to determine whether they are the right ones or not. Words remain, more or less and always, in their own sphere. Therefore, the answer to Valéry’s question must be: On en parle. One just speaks of it.

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There is a sort of austere freedom –or free austerity, if you will –in Sigrid Sandström’s paintings, that enables us to see them as entirely disengaged from any metaphoric allusions – indeed from anything that is not form in its own right. In short: these paintings can be understood as variations, similar to those so frequently found in music throughout history. Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Beethoven on a waltz by Diabelli are supreme examples. Self-sufficient worlds that seems so inviting, because of their self-sufficiency.

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Sigrid Sandström’s paintings are containers – dramatic events within entirely secluded spaces. Something is happening here, or has happened, or is about to happen. Complicated transformations, involving unknown agencies, caught in flight.

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There is a quality in these painting that is hard to define: it concerns the border between the space of the painting and that of the viewer. Perhaps it is on this very border that everything is happening. Questions arise – instances of fruitful uncertainty. Are we entering the painting? Or is it rather the painting and its elements that are approaching us? No doubt, there is a certain violence here, something appears to be hurled towards us, out of the picture. Can we defend ourselves?

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Not anything goes. Words can sometimes be wrong, no doubt. Sigrid Sandström tells me about an imperceptive gallerist who had seen her art as trompe-l’oeil. This misunderstanding aroused such anger in Sandström that she painted a small painting, quite different from her other, typically formal, meticulous paintings, with their cuttingly defined shapes, distinct colours and inventive spatial constructions. Instead, here everything is black, in black, a few forceful brush strokes across an otherwise empty canvas. A muddle of dray pigment piling up at the bottom of the painting. Atmospheric turbulence? A dark volcano eruption.
The sudden gesture as opposed to all that strenous construction? The painting can be seen as something momentary, a spontaneous outburst from a painter who doesn’t normally employ chance and spontaneity in her artistic process. It is also possible to see it as a retort: “Don’t think you can put a label – and definitely not that one! – on my work.” But I think it is more than that: this particular painting reveals something about Sigrid Sandström’s work in general. A deviation that clarifies what is at stake here: an energetic, sometimes darkly, violent, always dynamic process which under other conditions could have assumed completely different formal expressions.

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In art history’s age-old conflict between line and colour –Apollo vs Dionysius? – Sigrid Sandström tends to side with the line. Since the Renaissance at least, the line has defined the spatial boundaries of the image and governed its areas and volumes, their extension and form. The line reigns sovereign over colour – as if colour would otherwise run amok! As it does at the bottom of the small black painting.

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The recurrent, achromatic elements of this universe, that is to say the blacks and the whites: colour before colours. Colour as an unrealized possibility.

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All painting is a tribute. Even to that which we do not wish to see.

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Undefined spaces, axises of depth that draw us into the image, fragments scattered, obscure, voluminous and sometimes scary. Fragments – of what? They took it asunder I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? (James Joyce i Finnegans Wake)

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The oscillation between disgust and desire. The rhythm of life.

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It so happens that, as I am writing this text have been diagnosed with a torn knee-joint – a meniscus rupture. It hurts with every step I take. I am imagining (to make the pain bearable by tuning it into symbols?) sharp splinters, cutting at muscles and tendons. I suddenly perceive Sigrid Sandström’s paintings as related to my own body, something broken that still, miraculously, works. But if so, are the broken pieces about to break into even smaller ones, or are they joining together – actually healing?

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Ultimately, Sigrid Sandström’s paintings keep their relationship to the non-painterly altogether floating. If we try to translate them to the world as we know it, the same questions keep turning up over and over again: are these paintings about landscapes, about cultural space or perhaps about our mental lives? As metaphors, they are even possible to interpret as anatomical studies, visualized bodily presences –as I just did. One could also imagine them as–

One body. Just one. Only one.



Carl-Johan Malmberg
Stockholm, July 2010  


This text was published by Kajsa och Olle Nymans kulturstiftelse in conjunction with Sigrid Sandström’s solo exhibition at Olle Nymans  Ateljé in Saltsjö-Duvnäs in 2010.