“When nobody´s watching I dance” Acrylic 2015 61×49 cm
STEFAN MÅS PERSSON
a fantastic humorous journey of
a lifetime through unique and impossible architectural and inner labyrinths.
“When nobody’s watching I dance”, the picture beside, is the title of one of MÅS’s fantastic three dimensional paintings which can be seen as a dance through a billowing, complexly composed architecture in a state of constant change: bending, angling and rising through the spirals of eternity up towards the cosmos. A dance full of humor through turning paths which suddenly rise as vertical walls only to lead on up by way of a rickety ladder or through a gate, into secret, enigmatic rooms. Outside the gate the wall is transformed into a road where a character runs in through another new gate at full speed, perhaps in fear of sliding down; because if he continues a little bit further the road turns into a steep hill where you would have to walk upside down. Should he find a way out at the other end, he would have to windsurf across a turned bow which would throw him off into space. There he would risk slipping down into a building without a roof. He could also continue upstairs to the right – but he will never meet any of the characters on the next floor. No one sees the other. The journey is humorous and makes you laugh. No one appears to be able to meet anyone in these labyrinths. Everyone is standing at different vantage points. Each of them is alone. In another painting a little character is holding on to a balloon – or a tall pole pointing up towards space with clouds on three different levels. The loneliness is only enhanced. Or could all these gazing characters also be seen as the artist himself on his long journey through life, surrounded by inspiration and the eternal need to paint?
As a contrast the structured architecture is invariably mixed with outlooks on skies and small sensitive landscapes, at the beginning an abstract world of spots of paint. MÅS starts his paintings with a few spontaneous strokes of the paintbrush. He still does not know what will be. Gradually the shapes emerge – he stands in wonder – whence the inspiration? So did the great writer Marcel Proust as he had completed a book. “Is it really me who has written this?” he asked himself.
MÅS’s painting is unique, his art resembles nothing else and cannot be classified under any restricting concept of style. Perhaps his approach and enigmatic inspiration from the subconscious, his fusion of paradoxes and a sense of the fantastic, the impossible and the intangible, are related to surrealism which of course is not an art style.
Every painting is a world of its own, all of them different. At the same time every painting can be perceived as a long JOURNEY OF A LIFETIME through our own inner labyrinths, a world full of contrasts where everything is connected. A discovery into the unknown. Sometimes you are stuck, feeling lost, without knowing how to move on.
Then you suddenly find a way out – a tiny boat awaits, you float on to new horizons. Sometimes there are many horizons with waiting boats to escape in. As if the complex architecture had emerged as a city from the sea in many layers during many different eras. The search is constantly encouraged to constant renewal, there is no time to get caught up in habitual thinking. Humor is always, strongly present.
Ever since I first came to know his “sculptural paintings” as we exhibited them at Mjellby Konstmuseum Halmstad in 1999, I have been fascinated by his unusual, constantly varying inventiveness. No wonder his art flourishes around the world from little Halmstad, Lund, Copenhagen and Paris all the way to Toronto and Singapore to the joy of numerous spectators.
Viveka Bosson
Founder of Mjellby Art Museum in Halmstad,
File. Doctor Honoris Causa.
Halmstad November 7, 2015.