englishJOHAN GRÖNLUND (b. 1981)
First and foremost, I am a painter. My work will often center around the simple, basic aspects of life. A thematically stripped down type of painting that brings the depicted closer to something resembling, in a Platonic view, the actual idea behind the motif.
The properties of painting include the mundane yet magical ability to capture a piece of the world in surface and paint. The visual as well as the experienced. Representation in painting always transforms the subject, to paint is to place something within a historic and cultural tradition. Regardless of how honest the starting point for the representation may be, every rendering in picture will distance the represented from the real world to what could be called the world of pictures. Often this indirect route via the world of pictures is the starting point for my own work, the world as reflected in pictures. A particular humour also has its place in my painting and will at times emerge almost as an inevitable consequence of the seriousness.
The communicative aspect of art is overrated but art has a higher purpose, as it were, in giving physical form to the both elusive and universally human in experiences, thoughts and views. The main subject is - inescapably - the human being. Through countless ways of approaching what is fundamentally a tragic state, the transience of time and the fleeting nature of existence, painting along with the other artforms can shift our perspective on life. Experiences of art that are incorporated into one's character and become part of how one relates to the world.