In The Shower of Sparks That Constitutes This Eternal Event, It Is Indecipherably Written

The mainspring of my work has always been a fascination with what arises when I give myself to the unknown force and allow myself to trust what I do not understand.

In the beginning, I turned inwards, towards myself, in order to observe what was moving inside of me. Painting was like a magnifying glass, intensifying my feelings and bringing me closer to that which I did not yet understand. During this time, I first encountered Roj Friberg’s work. (1) Specifically, his interpretations of August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. (2) These works, which hung in the public library in the city where I grew up, portrayed some kind of catastrophic dinner party in a darkened castle. The halls were dimly lit by candelabras and chandeliers, which cast long shadows in hallways whose doors opened onto pitch-black rooms. These spaces were inhabited by black-clad ghosts, who sat stiffly around dining tables or stood lined up against a wall. In one picture, a violent accusation is thrown from one ghost to another; in another, there is the suggestion of a ghostly leg vanishing around a corner.

I immediately felt bound to this visual world, to the halls and the ghosts. I asked the librarian about the artist and learned that the paintings were illustrations of a play. A decade passed before I read this play—somehow it didn’t occur to me. Desiring to walk through the castle where Roj Friberg’s pictures were set, I started to expand on these scenes as soon as I came home.

For two years, I saw it as my primary task to uncover this castle through painting. Then I moved on. The ghosts were reduced to masks and hands, and the castle to lines of composition. In the mask, I found a doorway that allowed me to enter the picture. The mask was the fixed point that made all other points legible. The mask was my anchor.

Using this tool, I was able to reduce the picture even further, so much so that there was almost nothing but the mask left. Perhaps I’d produced a feedback loop of some kind, because painting became increasingly painful. I felt more and more disgust for the paintings, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t sleep or eat, only paint loathsome masks. I was no longer in control of my hand or my gaze, because they were drawn, as if by a magnetic force, to the abyss that was the mask. There was no longer space for any life: no room, no objects, nobody else, not even myself—only the mask. The idea of painting was so deeply associated with my sense of self that abandoning painting felt like giving up on my whole life, but I saw no other way forward. So, I burned all the paintings I’d entangled myself in and disavowed my brush and my paints.

One of my teachers at the time, David Skoog, once told me that as an artist you enter into the unknown, like an astronaut on a spacewalk. You dive into the dark, infinite expanse and bring your findings back to the ship. This means you have to be careful with the lifeline that binds you to the ship and your fellow humans, because there is no value in a treasure that you’re unable to make legible to others. To enter the infinite darkness is dangerous; if you lose the connection to the ship, you risk disappearing.

I believe this is what happened to Carl Fredrik Hill. When I look at the drawings produced during his years of illness, I feel that I understand them. Not fully, of course, because if that were possible, people would be able to find each other in this abyss, but that does not seem to happen. It seems like a lonely abyss. Still, I know what it’s like to see your own name written in the sky. I know what it’s like to sink so deeply into yourself that everyone else disappears. Luckily, I have always been able to hold onto the lifeline. This might be because of my belief that what remains once all the cognitive constructions have been peeled off is

hearing and music. That my soul is part of an enormous soul. That at the bottom of myself is a you. Glorious you. When I can no longer understand anything at all, it is still so clear that I’m listening, that I’m singing.

To and about you.

Around this time, I met Mattias Eliasson, a guest lecturer who introduced me to the way care for an object is transferred to a viewer. If the care given to an object is treated as the raw material of the work, this charge, for whatever reason, can be directly sensed by another person. Without quite realising it, I had amassed a fairly large collection of objects that I was beginning to use as thinking aids. I brought the mask into the work with these objects, since I had a strong sense that I wouldn’t be able to give the objects meaning without this North Star. Similarly, I felt dependent on the frame. In the larger world, everything is part of something bigger, but within the frame, I could see a scene as something complete and still. An eternity, frozen in time. As if the objects within that frame had always existed, as if they could not have been any other way.

The word “landscape” has served as a guide in my abstract meaning making. When I enter a commonplace room with a commonplace gaze, I sometimes catch myself thinking that the colour on the wall is too light, or that the table by the window would have made a more pleasing impression if it had a different kind of tablecloth. But when I look at a grove in a meadow, it would be absurd to have an opinion on how a particular tree is leaning. When I look at a landscape, I notice, instead, that I accept the picture. In this way, I allow it to encounter me with fewer barriers. By giving this attitude a name, I can call something a landscape and encounter it as such. Whenever I approach a scene like this, I feel it expanding and touching me in a way that feels very close.

Another guide for me in this kind of thinking is Giorgio Morandi. I believe that the same kind of discovery was highly central to Morandi’s work. By stilling a delimited portion of the world, Morandi appears able to get closer to the distant tones the objects give off, and then, through painterly treatment, bring them forth for general observation.

Since I was in the middle of a conflict with painting, yet had no other framework, I turned on an overhead projector and called it a frame, arranging objects inside its light as if I were painting. But an important difference was that my actions within the work did not leave a mark on my canvas and could be infinitely rearranged. This relieved some of the tension that had become difficult to bear—not without sacrifice, of course, as this tension is a powerful force in painting, but I needed to think that I wasn’t painting.

As I started to work in space, the big problem of photographic reproduction took on central importance. For me, seeing has always been linked to thinking and the body. The way an object slithers out of my attempt to grasp it, evading me, is part of what it means to see. What I see is inseparable from the feeling that it is, in the very moment of seeing, taken away from me. Seeing, then, is always broken, and this brokenness is something I want to preserve. The photographic image has always given me an impression of intactness, and therefore it’s always felt less real. So, when it came to documenting my work with the objects, I decided to draw it; this was a way of preserving something, at least for myself.

I was once gifted a book of Alberto Giacometti’s writing. (3) These were texts of various sorts, spanning his entire working life. The first section included essays submitted to magazines; the second section featured texts from notebooks organised in chronological order up until his death at age sixty-five; and the final section was made up of dialogues.

Even though Giacometti died long before I was born, I felt able, through this book, to get a sense of his whole person, so real that I could almost hear him. I felt that I understood his mental world and drives as well as my own. Giacometti often wrote about the different stages of seeing in its constant pendulum—for instance, the way a commonplace vista can suddenly break free of its flatness and flick you on the nose. Or how a regular glass of water can appear as the only stable point in a floating space of shapeless bodies.

For Giacometti, the highest endeavour was to portray the world as he saw it—a simple, conventional project, but impossible. He was cognizant of this impossibility, but I also think he kept this awareness at bay to preserve his desire to try.

Most of Giacometti’s writing is about his failures. And it is probably true that any attempt to portray the world in order to convey it as it appears is inevitably a failure. Knowing this, reaching—the act of reaching for something like a landscape—and ending up with a messy collection of marks on a canvas is both sad and pitiful. But in the failure, the motif is kept intact, affirmed as ungovernable.

As I started to draw from my eye, I came to understand how useful drawing is for trying to see. When I take the position of drawing from my eye, my gaze changes. I do not ask what I am seeing; instead, I follow, and the hand imitates what meets the eye. In the hand rests a hidden matrix of gestures. These gestures, extended or interrupted, wavering or intent, are knit together, making a portrait of the eye’s wanderings, which I, through my body, am given access to understand. Putting down my drawing later, I find that the object I’ve portrayed has become more complex. It’s unfurled a little.

If I continue to give the object my attention, it keeps growing. With time, its impressions sharpen, so much so that I experience the object as corresponding to a point inside of me. When I subsequently place two objects that have gone through a similar treatment within a scene, turning them, it feels as if something within me turns, slowly. This discovery amazed me. By focusing on an arrangement of objects before me, I was able to observe and turn something that was inside of me.

For some time, I made it my primary task to attempt to understand how to approach an object without my preconceived notions blocking it. I was trying to figure out how I could allow the object to enter and work directly inside of me, so that I could attempt to understand what it was that I, in approaching the objects, came into contact with.

But the mask remained in the middle of my work and blocked my view.

Slowly, it was becoming clear to me that I was nearing the dead end I’d previously reached in painting, because when it came to presenting an installation, it didn’t feel complete without a mask in it, looking. Part of me had clung to the mask—to the extent that when I considered banishing it from my work, my sense of self seemed to pass before my eyes. I didn’t understand why I had created all these masks that were now lined up on shelves, looking down at me. It was as if I’d transferred part of me to the mask and sealed it. I didn’t know what was in the mask, but the thought of letting it slip from my hands and break against the stone floor was as off-putting as the idea of biting my finger with all my might. The longer I look at the mask, the blurrier my own lines become, the duller my surroundings.

I believe that James Ensor experienced something very similar. It looks as if he, too, felt the mask tug at his gaze. The painting Still Life with a Cabbage illustrates this; you can clearly see a mask break into the picture, turning the still life into a play. (4)

Ensor’s many still lifes almost always seem to exist on a spectrum of an impending and ongoing intrusion of these masks. They flip the outward-looking gaze inside out, mixing what is in the surrounding space and what is inside Ensor. Out of this mess, a spectacle emerges, where the inner voices bleed into the surrounding space. This turning inside out of the internal chatter puts the person making the painting at a remove. As I came to understand Ensor, I also started to understand myself. So, I packed up all my masks and placed them in a wooden crate in the basement, watched The Ghost Sonata, the play on which Roj Friberg’s series was based, and started to write a script.

Up until then, the idea of writing a dialogue had been completely foreign to me, but suddenly I understood that it wasn’t in any way a question of fiction, just of splitting oneself into different continents and listening.

I placed myself to the side of myself and observed the monologue that incessantly rises from me, as if from a steam engine. By studying its movement, I was able to localise three principles within me. I named them Figure 1, Figure 2, and Figure 3. Then I documented them as they spoke.

By giving these principles a name, I became a room, and the constant negotiation around power, guilt, order, and disorder was given a body in the room. Consequently, in the dialogue, I was able to see the very movement of thought. I have heard it said that it is the paradoxes in a system that give the system its power, and I see that now. For a long time, I was looking for the thoughts’ conclusions, the fruits that the thought can produce, and which can be of more or less use. Now, instead, I had turned to the body of the thought, which is to say, the constant movement of dissolution and reconstruction, of yielding and pushing away, of swelling and sinking.

I read Plato again and realised that it was high time to give these figures a motive. So, I put the motives that I’ve struggled to figure out my whole life into the room:
Agency.
Memory.

The real.
Where am I?
What is an object? And so on.

This produced no fruit. Instead, a movement developed that illustrated what it is to wonder. And what it’s like to be stuck inside oneself. I created three masks and three hands, gave them each a role, and built the room I had painted so many times. I sewed bodies from black velvet, and the masks became dolls. Then I engaged my closest friends. I see myself in each of them, and I was able to see them in me. The puppeteers’ relationship to the dolls and to each other as well as the dolls’ relationship to their lines, the audience, and to the spirit that binds the things to their path became the play’s primary motives. (5)

When the mask had been given a body, a voice, and a room, I was freed of it. I was free to turn my gaze outwards, towards what is not me. So, I turned to the trees, because the trees have always been able to suddenly break through the flatness that cloaks the world in my gaze. The tree rushes over me in a flood that also takes my ability to translate the world into something graspable. When that happens, the separation between myself and what I experience begins to fade. Only then am I in the state I call “seeing,” where I am touched by what happens and the matte membrane that covers my gaze is broken.

For me, Ibn Arabi has been a guide in this searching, this longing for the world. He writes about what I call “seeing” as two different kinds of eyes: my eyes and your eyes. He describes approaching the real as a dissolution. When my grasping fails, both outside of me and within, “I” will die before death, and the eyes become yours.

“Listen, O dearly beloved!
I am the reality of the world, the center of the circumference, I am the parts and the whole.
I am the will established between Heaven and Earth,
I have created perception in you only in order to be the object of my perception.

If then you perceive me, you perceive yourself.
But you cannot perceive me through yourself,
It is through my eyes that you see me and see yourself, Through your eyes you cannot see me.

Dearly beloved!
I have called you so often and you have not heard me.
I have shown myself to you so often and you have not seen me.
I have made myself fragrance so often, and you have not smelled me,
Savorous food, and you have not tasted me.
Why can you not reach me through the object you touch Or breathe me through sweet perfumes?
Why do you not see me? Why do you not hear me?
Why? Why? Why?” (6)

I turn to the trees to see, because they show me very clearly how close I am. Painting, in this situation, becomes a kind of bookkeeping. When I read the tree and put my depiction in order, I’ve pushed the view away, replacing it, and the picture becomes stiff and dead. If I keep, instead, my grasping instinct to seal the tree at bay, a crack can remain, through which the real light of the tree can push out and float into my trembling hands, my witnessing hands. The picture becomes broken and charged.

In this state of seeing, something is uncovered. Not on the canvas, but in my soul. The objects turn out to be transparent, and inside them one entwined shadow trembles. Every time I see, I see this, from a new position. When it is time to navigate, these glimpses of seeing become leading marks, points that, when seen in a line, tell the navigator her position. The paintings of the trees, then, become a charting of sorts.

A lousy chart, I should say.

I initially approached the trees by trying to find a legible meaning in their various gestures. This thought was based on the simple fact that trees grow according to a determined structure, which they later either diverge from or follow, like attack and decay as described in a musical score. But all that came from this attempt to translate the trees were reductions and misunderstanding. I abandoned the thought.

It is possible that the legible meaning I was seeking cannot be achieved through a template, because if I measure the trees using the template I’ve invented, the resulting numbers tell me nothing. The trees remain in place, at the same distance. I believe, instead, that getting close is about sympathy. Because how does a child learn to feel for music? It must be the same to feel for trees.

This is not at all about measuring, but about connecting them to your body, about leaning close to what happens in yourself at the sight of a tree, letting yourself follow. I can’t translate the tree’s gesticulating pirouettes into concrete concepts, but when I watch them happening, they are absolutely clear. I see what the tree does, and it gives meaning. This is how I learned to read trees.

As my gaze was freed from the mask, I too could walk freely through the halls that were now empty. When I, having just started painting, entered the rooms prepared by Roj Friberg, I encountered drama and ghosts. These rooms are now empty. I send my gaze through the surface I’ve chosen to paint on, letting myself sink, and I enter something that resembles a house of glass. I turn, and the whole glass world rotates. I sink, and it rises. With my brush, I mark what moves past me in the journey through the room: arches, corners, and mouldings.

Every movement echoes. Until the image closes again, and I see nothing. There, too, is a sky.

1. Roj Friberg, Ur Spöksonaten [From the Ghost Sonata], 1983–93, colour lithographs. The lithographs comprise a portfolio of Bifteen prints inspired by August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata (1907), printed by Duro GraBiska in an edition of 160. In the late 1980s, Parisian gallerist Edouard Weiss contacted Lena Cronqvist and Roj Friberg, asking each of them to interpret a Strindberg play of their choosing to be included in a set of published lithographs.

2. August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata, 1907. The play premiered 21 January 1908 at Intima Teatern in Stockholm.

3. Alberto Giacometti, Écrits [Writings], ed. Mary Lisa Palmer and François Chaussende (Paris: Hermann, 1990).

4. James Ensor, Nature morte au chou [Still Life with a Cabbage], 1921, in the collection of Krö ller-Mü ller Museum.

5. Felix Oscar Christiannson, Chimärans bälgar (om längtan genom natten) [The Bellows of the Chimera (about longing through the night)], KHM 2 Gallery, Malmö , 21 February–8 March 2025. Participants: Viktor Nilsson, Charlotte Foureaux, Tobias Westholms, and Andrea Sitara Gran.

6. Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, “The Creative Feminine: Sophiology and Devotio Sympathetica” [c. 1209], trans. Ralf Manheim Henry Corbin, in Creative Imagination in the SuEism of Ibn Arabi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 174.