JESPER NYRÉN

COMPOSITE

OPENING THURSDAY 20 FEBRUARY, 5—7 PM
THROUGH 23 MARCH 2025

SVENSKA

I spent the Christmas holiday reading Willy Kyrklund's travel chronicles in Aigaion och Till Tabbas in a fragile paperback anthology from the Delfin series from 1965. I didn't know then that I would connect Jesper Nyrén's new works with a passage from Kyrklund's entertaining but almost painfully scholarly essays.

But then there's the matter of the exhibition's title, Composite. It refers to the hybrid column order that encompasses both the Corinthian and Ionic orders, an architectural bastard if you will. Nyrén's new paintings sometimes consist of several "orders," they are paintings built of blocks.

Kyrklund writes so enviably clear and straightforward about enormous civilizations and architectural basic forms:

"In Egypt, sun-dried brick in monumental architecture was replaced by stone. The Egyptian column, which still has something of a petrified tree trunk in its essence, paleozoic petrified giant-equisetum, reached its full development of independence and expressiveness in Greece. The Greek temple is built of stone and air.

In the East, however, they held fast to sun-dried brick. The architecture became different; the nature of the building material favoured massiveness and colossal format, the dominant figure was the wall, the heavy solid wall mass, with decoration in the surface plane. The Babylonian temple is an artificial mountain."

The column and the order, decoration in the surface plane. But the tree trunk as origin.

Jesper Nyrén's artistry is often preoccupied with traces of historical art from other times but also ancient geological traces. A colour from a medieval Italian fresco or a moss-covered stone from the northern archipelago might appear on Nyrén's canvases. And perhaps it is most prominent in the assembled parts that coexist in one work? The exhibition displays a permission, it contains different positions and approaches to colour. However, the parts consist of the same painterly body but in different tempos. Nyrén speaks of not letting it become too sacred, that it's easy for an individual work to somehow become a star that must be protected. Hence the fusion of different elements into one.

A terse description of some of the new works might read: mist – horizon – sky, or stone – Pierre Bonnard-purple – corrugated metal. The metal then takes another painterly step and becomes an undulating sea, laboriously raked gravel, or a gleaming silk fabric. 

Some of the paintings are connected to places, or at least to models, others are atmospheres, they might have a basis in reality (whatever that is) and then become less analytical and are instead charged with associations rather than something recognizable, many times the works represent "just" the colour they consist of. Nyrén paints slowly and carefully, and always strives for the image to be felt, they are cold and warm, fuzzy and rough. I want to connect Kyrklund's words about the different columns' nature to the optical illusions Nyrén paints. Just as the Egyptian proto-columns are actually meant to resemble tree trunks, Nyrén works tirelessly with a painting that both mimics nature and simultaneously is paint on canvas. The columns reach toward the sky like plants, Nyrén's paintings are a play with the elements, sometimes he has allowed erosion to occur but under completely controlled forms, a terse trompe l'œil effect.

I have thought about how traditional Japanese wall-hanging scrolls, so-called kakemono or kakejiku works are divided. There the image is mounted on silk. The upper silk part is called heaven and the lower earth, and the surface on the side are the pillars that shore up the whole thing. It's a practical solution, the work should be able to be rolled up, but it's also a spatial solution where the work has its own portable world around it. The same applies to Japanese paintings made on panels, they are equal parts painting and architecture. Nyrén's panels are one work but they are not seamless images that interlock, he has compared it to how a Japanese garden can be constructed, when a new section begins it should not be defined by a wall but rather a shift, a lighter gravel or an angle that suddenly makes you see the trees outside the garden.

 I have written about Nyrén's art before and I still have an old note about his early paintings. I wrote that they were like "pressed matter, diamonds can be glimpsed inside the mountain." But the funny thing is that the new works no longer seem to strive for refinement in the same way. His paintings shine just as brightly in the form of rocks, a matte pink surface, or a monochrome sky over a still/stylized sea as the bright diamond cuts or shifts from before.

 Sara Walker

Stockholm, February 2025