Galleri Flach is proud to inaugurate the fall season by launching Jesper Nyrén’s second solo exhibition Unfold at Galleri Flach. The exhibition includes a number of new paintings in three different series, which expand the abstract patterns that we already got to know in Nyréns subtle artistry.
“I think about church windows and their capability of colouring the air, in essence, being able to colour the atmosphere”.
Jesper Nyréns recent paintings resemble undulating fields of colour. An optical effect makes them move. The parts connect and form new shapes. ”Unfold” refers to phases of development. The folding-out.
Nyréns painting may portray scientific forms, or forms that cannot be seen except for under a microscope. This is also the case in the new paintings. They may resemble molecular structure formulas, or any nature given pattern designs. Or they are autonomous phenomena’s with no connection to a tangible counterpart. The situation for abstraction has always been that it is compared to something actual or sensible, for how can we rest in the non-pictures?
One way to look at Nyréns images is to let our eyes detect logical ramifications. One can see the system and try to find an actual painterly starting point. From one point everything is unfolded. Then there is a possible way out: to listen and to complete the painting. They are challenging image-surfaces that can become almost infinitely large, since the eye develops new parts, as I imagine that Nyrén is guided by his own painterly system, when an image starts to ”be” he must complete it. The language he uses cannot be used carelessly because everything is visible. Each part of the great Rorschach fields has a corresponding image, a painterly soul mate on the other side of the picture surface. The twin surfaces are not identical twins. Colours vary but the end result is an argument in itself that they are inseparable, that precisely these parts need each other, on either side.
Nyréns compositional ideas are rooted in different architectural expressions and thoughts concerning a self-sufficient world of signs. In the balance in the pictures are also ideas about art history, of all the attempts at making harmonizing images, a mandala to meditate upon. It is an endeavour that is evident in his methodically rendered paintings. He tones the colours up and down and the different images are given a topography. Nyrén speaks about creating a place within the painting, a place to be in and how an outer and an inner world can relate to each other. It is a physical place and the paintings own formal room. The basis of his earlier paintings were a very real / physical object, a big glass diamond. Through it he photographed landscapes and places then immortalized in the paintings. Titles testified of the places where they came from. Now Nyrén sees these places without a diamond between himself and the outside world, the one that filters light. The painting is its own room, but certainly relates to a surrounding universe.
Sara Walker
Summer 2013
