(Published in Paletten #1 2011, special edition by Maria Lind)

Splotchy, gurgling, and billowing, Viktor Rosdahl’s paintings don’t inspire confidence concerning their permanency. They could be swallowed up by darkness, like that spreading across the works like a creeping, corrosive stain. There was something here that was covered over in paint by a human over time. But perhaps, conversely, the painting reveals something that the unpainted surface did not. The unpainted surface hid a different thing that it did not permit you to see in its blankness. Things were not so clear in the process and the work registers this. Rosdahl maintains an open mind, most times, as to how the painting might develop; there is no use, he says, in attempts to “fake the ruin,” as particularly evident in the more feverish, densely layered works which he will sometimes exhibit and then take back to the studio and rework, continuing a process of ruination both incidental and deliberate. Rosdahl is interested in the means by which subject matter might affect the gesture of its own depiction. For instance, in Till en vän (2010), painted on black artificial leather, wafting, wavering vermicelli overcome an angular urban landscape, smothering the representable in phantasmagoric smog. What would you find if you stared long enough, or allowed your eyes to lose focus, alighting on some elsewhere? Paint proves both revelatory and enshrouding. As Rosdahl describes it: “out of the ruins can sometimes come new approaches.” This articulation of his process in turn appears as a latent narrative in many of the worlds he limns. In Elineberg 2020 (2010), Rosdahl paints the portrait of the Helsingborg social housing in which he grew up, examples of the myriad constructions of the Million Programme of the nineteen sixties and seventies. The titular future for these buildings aligns with the futurology of the modernist and modernization projects themselves (buttressed by utopian projections) but the painting tells a different story. Rather than a future constructed by the rationality of ordered living, one tower block has sprung a river of a leak; in the foreground a phosphorescent ecology germinates from the stream. This contaminated pastoral has been painted on putty, affixed to wood. The putty is ephemeral, anti-precious, if anything a blight on the white ground of its support, a rubberized vandalism that does not lend comfort to Rosdahl’s vision nor to the welfare state monuments imaged within. Time wreaks an ambiguous revenge. Elineberg 2020 marries a representation of social decay to that of its repurposing towards a state of nature, poised ambivalently between idyll and wasteland, ruins and “new approaches.” Perhaps the utopia here is an architecture that would stop doing what it was told, springing a leak that might flood its own foundations. Architecture bestows legitimacy–power–through its forms, a grab-bag of motifs and references. But the architecture in Rosdahl’s paintings is a hazy one–pocked, shape-shifting, phantasmagoric. A reference image–a memory, a photograph–is appropriated, collaged into a new context in which it might function to symbolize something else…but what? There is a sense of loss, of a grimy camouflage, but what has been lost? While architecture as it appears in Rosdahl’s painting exists to produce legitimacy, Rosdahl’s paintings seek, by contrast, to delegitimate, layer by layer. In Född till a herska (2010), Rosdahl represents a building he visited in Vilnius, Lithuania, a neoclassical edifice that had previously been the Soviet party headquarters. In the past few years, it has housed a marketplace for an informal economy of local buying and selling, the intentions  of the party retrofitted for an alternate program. In the foreground, a solitary figure operates a motorized plow, taming the swampy grasses that have run wild on the grounds. Much as nature had reconstituted the function of the Elineberg housing blocks, so too does the undomesticated landscape produce a space for doubt and ambiguity. Is this a fantasy of Soviet post-history parallel to the agrarian ideals of its prehistory? Can political symbols be trusted (never as transparent as they claim to be)? If the facade cannot aid in our imagination of what it contains, then what is the battleground of representation when images, so untrustworthy already, have been so used-up? Here, in a slanted manner, Rosdahl’s paintings recall what anthropologist Michael Taussig has said about defacement–of monuments, of idols, of works of art : Defacement is like Enlightenment. It brings insides outside, unearthing knowledge, and revealing mystery. As it does this, however, as it spoliates and tears at tegument, it may also animate the thing defaced and the mystery revealed may become more mysterious, indicating the curious magic upon which Enlightenment, in its elimination of magic, depends. [...] Defacement works on objects the way jokes work on language, bringing out their inherent magic nowhere more so than when those objects have become routinized and social, like money or the nation’s flag in secular societies where God has long been put in his place[...]This reconfiguration of repression in which depth becomes surface so as to remain depth, I call the public secret, which, in another version, can be defined as that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated[...]” [1] Are money and the nation’s flag (Taussig’s examples) magical or are they circulating material whose magic might be undone–disinvested? Perhaps Rosdahl’s work favors one magic over another. Where is the aura? Is it in a flag or is it in the animating line that de-priviledges the promises of such things and makes them strange, makes them a torqued world? What Taussig observes in the toppling and destruction of monuments and other icons, Rosdahl incorporates in the process of making, what the artist describes as his attempt to “depict and gestalt an image that is somewhat cleared and blurred in mind at the same time.” In certain recent works, Rosdahl fuses reference images from his own life with found images culled from the media, old books, works of art, film stills, and record sleeves. But the legibility–the traceability–of these images and their sources is seldom clear to the uninitiated viewer. Illegibility is mimetic of larger operations and tendencies–of the political sign’s cooptation, of the predominant inadequacy of images to produce change; what was specific and grounded becomes impressionistic and unmoored. In other works, this process of dislodging images can be seen to do the inverse; the circulation is brought to a standstill, allowing another mode of contemplation to occur. Shield (2) (2009) brings two such circulating objects to rest. Rosdahl had found a plastic bag on the street which he kept for a long stretch of time; he began to stitch it, then to paint it affixed to a canvas. The bag–that ubiquitous signifier of disposable culture–in turn serves as ground for an image Rosdahl painted based upon a still from a YouTube video of Chilean folk singer and activist Victor Jara performing for a group of children. Jara, who was tortured and murdered in 1973 during the early days of Augusto Pinochet’s military regime, circulates on YouTube as a flickering film clip; the singer’s image is again and again mobilized even as his life was deemed disposable. Jara’s immateriality rests but also crystallizes on a plane shared by the plastic bag–another artifact to which a canvas might lend a distinct discursive frame. Both a painting and something else, Shield (2) shares with Rosdahl’s growing body of work an overlay of temporalities that seek to both arrest images from their state of flux just as they enact their own process of decay that threatens to subsume all representation. These temporalities ask questions of the present, the present as a place occupied by the past’s artifacts–artifacts to which we primarily turn a blind eye or to which we so often enact a process of subversion. Jara, for Rosdahl, embodies the figure of the politically-engaged artist; Jara’s practice–which also included the writing of poetry and directing theatrical productions–directly engaged with a broad swath of the public in the years preceding the Pinochet regime. In Gris pa min gaffel (2008), too, the image of an artist as a political actor appears as a fragment with an uneasy relation to the present, when fewer examples come to mind. Imaged in black oil paint upon a convex mirror, this work reproduces a photograph from 1968 of Swedish writer Jan Myrdal whose involvement in the FNL movements in support of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front was well-known. In Gris pa min gaffel, human figures are relegated to the lower sector of the circular painting with Myrdal on the left (the Left) resisting police officers and the threat of their batons. The mirror, in which, forty years later we might have seen ourselves reflected, has been painted over thickly; we are not there and it is paint but not paint alone which separates us. Rosdahl’s works often reach further back, evoking the nineteenth century, as handed down to us in its material culture as well as in its remnants populating our present–the conjoined births of railroads, factory labor, and photography, but also of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. A time of Karl Marx and, by its end, a time of Sigmund Freud and Max Weber. Freud told us human thought and action were motivated by the subconscious, latent beneath the surface of behavior and utterance. Weber told us there was a spirit of capitalism, a form of charisma that drove it and which made it attractive; it would not survive otherwise. Rosdahl’s work is not escapist in its out-of-timeness, but instead works against nostalgia, not wistful for those better days back then but rather invokes the past’s barbaric persistence in the present. Conjuring the agglomeration of an industrial wave and its aftermath–these days most commonly relegated to children’s book illustrations and graphic novels, Hör maskinernas sang (2009) takes as its referent an early twentieth century postcard imaging Sweden’s industrial heritage in the form of an urban landscape. In Rosdahl’s rendering, this scene is riddled with abscesses–the industrial city as festering sore. The painting exhumes and magnifies the postcard image not to the scale of civic space but to a scale intermediate between that of the postcard as flat promotional object and the urban landscape it captured. The appropriated image then is subjected to a form of ruination in its replication, turned unwieldy and splotchy. Unfinished sections of the work became integral and thus representational–the obscure and unformed read as smoke, decay. Painted on silk and hung with string from a metal frame, Bröllopsnatt pa SKF (2009) also derives from a postcard–this one of the interior of a massive Swedish factory given over to ghostly projections, its ceiling ribbed and awe-inspiring as a whale skeleton. For Rosdahl, these industrial referents summon the alienation of labor enacted in these spaces, to which he accredits a genealogy of social ills and to which his own process seeks a counter-operation. That Rosdahl makes his studio in a converted industrial building is not unique; that the history of such a space finds its afterglow in his industrial landscapes and interiors produces a triangular relation between the site, what was and what is now produced there. Distinct from the modes of production refined in the nineteenth century’s factories, Viktor Rosdahl’s work nevertheless also embodies a form of labor. It is apparent in the heavily marked surface of his canvases; these are worked works. As with all art, in Rosdahl’s paintings there is a labor expenditure operating at a degree of remove from its use value. One surface becomes the ground for over-application, over-investment of a plane. To make the labor of the work more laborious is also to take more time and to make a different type of investment in time than we are accustomed to. It is of course also work about time. What type of production is this, these images prone to spills, wreckage? Is it the painting of defacement? In Rosdahl’s works, “in which depth becomes surface so as to remain depth” (Taussig), something becomes an image so that it might remain, somewhere beneath, haunting us while it sleeps.

[1] Michael Taussig, Defacement: public secrecy and the labor of the negative Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999): 3-5.

Niko Vicario January, 2011  About the author >>

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(Publicerat i Kunstforum nr 2 1012):

Viktor Rosdahl har sedan han utexaminerades från Konsthögskolan i Malmö 2007 uppmärksammats som en av Sveriges mer lovande konstnärer i sin generation. Han har haft flera utställningar på gallerier och deltagit i en mängd samlingsutställningar, bl.a. Modernautställningen som visades på Moderna Museet under hösten 2010. Rester av en återskapad händelse I Viktor Rosdahls målningar sprider sig virvlande rörelser som täcker hela ytan. Molnformade rökpuffar stiger uppåt i slingor som ser ut att ha ristats eller frätts in i underlaget. Här finns också en atmosfärisk tyngdlöshet som kan förknippas med rök, dis och ånga. Samtidigt har tunga slöjor av färg runnit, och kanske rinner de fortfarande, långsamt ned mot bildernas bottenslam. Den febrila aktivitet som lagts ned i bilderna under tillkomsten fortsätter att påverka betraktaren. Målningarna har en märkligt oavslutad karaktär, en obestämd dimmighet, som trotsar deras pregnanta grafiska mönsterverkan i svartvitt. Den kan i sin utbredning påminna om klotter, eller om sånt bildkrafsande som tillkommit i ögonvrån medan man tänkt på annat. Men målningarnas slutliga utseenden har arbetats fram i en målmedveten kamp med materialet, där Rosdahl återanvänt tekniska lösningar som han upptäckt av en slump. Hans verk har en imponerande visuell konsekvens som vilar i en fritt prövande metod. Viktor Rosdahls bilder utspelas mot en historisk fond av kollektiv brutalitet som visar prov på en mängd visuella släktskap. Tänk dig att Vincent van Goghs böljande himlar eller Gustav Klimts jugendlinjer blandas med Gustave Dorés eller Odile Redons fantasilandskap. Om du därtill lägger Victor Hugos visionära teckningar och berättelser från 1800-talets begynnande industriella expansion får du en visuell grundton som ligger bortom det nostalgiskt tillbakablickande. Någonstans där befinner sig Viktor Rosdahl måleriskt i sin kartläggning av dagsläget. Så även om hans emblematiska lilla målning Dark Throne från början är en bearbetning av det norska black metal bandet Darkthrones album Panzerfaust, finns där indirekt referenspunkter till bildkulturen som de nämnda konstnärerna verkade i. Samt en blinkning till ljuset hos den romantiske tyske konstnären Caspar David Friedrich. Viktor Rosdahl har i en intervju beskrivit att han ser på måleri och teckning som en berättelse om seendets historia: ”Det handlar om hur din blick fungerar. Vi har alla en egen verklighetsuppfattning, vår egen tolkning som beror på vår uppväxt.” Och det är hans eget synsätt som styr bildernas riktning – hans infärgning av målningarnas material, om man så vill. Efter ett besök i konstnärens ateljé i ett gammalt industriområde strax utanför Malmö i södra Sverige, får jag en känsla av att det vardagliga livet lämnar ett stort avtryck i hans konst. Att han har en medveten öppenhet för hur det kan komma att ge utslag i målningarna. Människor han har omkring sig och saker han ser varje dag är en ständig källa till nya bildidéer. De virvlande himlarna som finns i hans senare målningar, och som nästan har ett abstrakt utseende, utgår till exempel från hans dotters målningar. Delar av hennes bilder accentueras genom att han följer penseldragen i färgen. Rosdahl tecknar direkt på de slingrande formerna och hittar ett mönster som han kan använda i målningar. ”Jag tar också enkla bilder med mobilkameran som jag sedan utgår från. Bilder från området, från cyklandet mellan hemmet och ateljén. Det är en jakt att fånga hur jag själv upplevde situationen.” Att försöka bevara glappet som alltid uppstår mellan erfarenheten och bilden av erfarenheten i gestaltningen uppfattar jag som en stark drivkraft för Viktor Rosdahl. I sitt konstnärskap utnyttjar och undersöker han den ofrånkomliga åtskillnad som existerar mellan dessa poler. Rosdahl tycks vara övertygad om att det någonstans i bilden finns en rest av den upplevelse som han velat skildra. Något igenkännbart som kan få betraktaren att fortsätta berättelsen i tanken. Kanske är det för högtidligt att kalla den för ”sanning”, men Rosdahl har själv ett utpräglat poetiskt sätt att tala om sina målningar på. Han kallar dem för ”skärvor av seende”, ”snöflingor ur livet” eller ”flingor av verklighet” – liknelser som väl svarar mot hur hans konst faktiskt ser ut. Han vill att ”målningarna ska bakas långsamt” och försöker ständigt gå vidare i sitt uttryck. Att visa målningar på en utställning kan vara ett sätt att pröva hur de fungerar utanför ateljén, men ofta målar han vidare på verk som ställts ut. Målningarna uppvisar märken av ett tryck från verkligheten, en pågående nötning som sätter fysiska spår i ytan. Och den kommer inte bara från den dagliga strömmen av intryck, utan också från materialet självt. Dels använder Viktor Rosdahl saker som kastats bort och som han kan arbeta vidare med. Kläder i olika material, lampor eller presenningar blir ibland underlag för bilder. Men det går också att hitta användbara spår i målningen, i reliefen som bildas på de delar av bilden som har målats över. Båda sätten fungerar som ett slags objektiv genväg till det utseende han eftertraktar. Och för att upprätthålla kontakten med verkliga platser eller bildminnen behöver han experimentera fram tekniker för hur cigarettrök eller bensin i en vattenpöl ser ut i bild, till exempel. Han pressar målningar med fuktig färg mot varandra, han fräter på duken med lösningsmedel och lindar in den i plast för att skapa en närmast fysiskt upplöst bild. ”Jag är intresserad av att plocka upp det som en gång har varit viktigt, men som har blivit ett bortglömt fragment”, beskriver Viktor Rosdahl sin metod. Han har använt sekelgamla vykort med motiv från dåtidens industrimiljöer som utgångspunkt i flera målningar. I Bröllopsnatt på SKF (2009) porträtterar han fabrikens interiör som en jättelik bröstkorg. Det som en gång var samhällets nav liknar skelettet av en strandad val. Rosdahl pekar på hur dessa vykort har förändrats genom att sammanhanget har förändrats. Utvecklingen har gjort industrilokalerna överflödiga, och bildernas berättelse har blivit mer kryptisk i saknaden efter en verklig referens. Rosdahl har också intresserat sig för den medeltida handskriften Les Très riches heures du Duc de Berry av bröderna Limbourg. Där finns en skevhet i avbildningen av människorna som han menar gör dem mer uttrycksfulla: ”När vi idag uppfattar folk i bilderna som finklädda är det egentligen ett tecken på nuets föreställning om en annan tid.” Rosdahls kommentar får mig att inse att han kanske inte är så upptagen av det dagsaktuella, utan av mer mångbottnade frågeställningar om hur historien flätas samman med samtiden. Det ena behöver i och för sig inte utesluta det andra, men hans konstnärskap öppnar perspektiv både bakåt och framåt i tiden. Hur kommer man se på vår kultur om hundra år? Vår kunskap om, och synen på, det förflutna baserar sig på källor som är slumpmässiga och ofullständiga – om än fantasieggande. Målningen ”Grisajävlar” (2010) tycks avbilda ett demonstrationståg där en grupp ungdomar uttrycker sin frustration över polisens brutalitet. Rosdahls förlaga har varit ett foto tagit av en vän i efterdyningarna av kravallerna  i Rosengård, en starkt segregerad stadsdel i Malmö. Vi kan känna igen samma sorts stela förenkling av personerna som finns hos bröderna Limbourg. Man poserar inför kameran med segertecken och sneda leenden. Men demonstrationen är redan upplöst, och här pågår istället efterspelet där man på ett lekfullt sätt retas med polisen. Vad har man uppnått? Vad blir kvar av händelser som vi uppfattat som viktiga? Förstår vi vad som sker just nu? Även om ”Grisajävlar” skildrar en nyss förfluten händelse öppnar Rosdahls målning tidsmässiga schakt. Åtskilligt har redan utspelat sig sedan dess. Det är som om han ser på samtiden med en framtida betraktares ögon.

Magnus Bons

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(excerpt from the catalogue in conjunction with the show Lunds Konsthall Presentation  curated by Anders Kreuger, Cosmin Costinaş and Åsa Nacking)

.…A painting practice that produces condensed images and explores new modes of formal and technical expression but at the same time quotes freely from art history and unambiguously reflects political convictions. These ambitions might seem difficult to reconcile, but Viktor Rosdahl makes them converge in images that are both intensive and extensive. His paintings spill over unconventional found surfaces such as shower curtains, bridal veils or tree trunks. They are commentaries on the compromised utopias of contemporary life, excursions into the visual storytelling of previous centuries and ruthless expansions of the physical territory for oil painting. He does not shirk from delivering sharp remarks, which he manages to do elegantly without becoming too elegant or straying from the meaningful, the legible. Viktor Rosdahl shows several recent paintings. Wrath of the Tyrant (2007) stages a particularly dramatic contrast between the support ( a black leather coat from  the 1970s) and the figurative motifs: a lethal duel from Jan Troell´s film The Emmigrants from 1972 and an abstract firmament with very small fixed stars (little specks of paint delicate as a single paintbrush hair). Dead End. A Transperent History Schbook (2008) is an undulating pastoral view, painted on a partly melted plexiglass box, where suddenly the young Olof alme appears, photographed during an American study trip. This is surely an evocation of neutral Swede´s deep entanglement with the Superpower. In the larger painting Shield (2009) a group of younsters and police stand around an outdoor fire. Nothing is happening right now, but this is the Rosengård area in Malmö, which recently has been erupting into riots and arson. Shield 2 (2009) and My years as a soccer wife (2009) are dominated by landscaped bodies of fluid paint, but they also offer stills from the current mass media images, such as the Chilean singer Victor Jara performing in an isolated mountain village…”

Anders Kreuger

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(From a text pressented in the context of Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation schoolarships 2009):

Viktor Rosdahl’s paintings seems to thrive in the most unexpected situations – in the hole in a broken table top from Ikea, in a shower curtain or a damp-damaged tarpaulin. Out of soot-blackened, deserted industrial landscapes the old-master-like paintings emerge bearing titles such as Wedding Night at SKF, My years as a soccer wife and Landing/Shelter for Aniara. In the borderland between the personal and the political a much-longed-for landing site is prepared for the wandering spaceship of the dream of the welfare state.

Cecilia Widenheim …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Viktor Rosdahl is a young, unusually talented artist working in Malmö and Stockholm, Sweden. He is mainly working with painting, although occasionally, the paintings are developing into sculpture. Only using found material as his canvas, Rosdahl is exploring and intervening into the dark underside of the relations between humans – sexual, political and emotional. He is moving freely between art historical references, Goth culture, and his own imaginations, ending up with fantastic, passionate, grotesque, poetic images on how the down trampled people in our society get exploited even more. The anger and violent protest in his imagery is balanced with the delicate tenderness in the way the pictures are executed. Viktor Rosdahls work shows an alternative to the escape into your own private paradise, be it through drugs or insanity or by just cutting off. He is a romantic who has the courage to stand up for what he takes for the good and the true in our existence.

Gertrud Sandqvist, Professor, Malmö Art Academy

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Stort tack till alla skribenterna. Thanks to all of  the authors.