ALF BJÖRK - Paintings
14-15.11 2009

Press Release

An intense and nervous pulse beneath the surfaces

Most of Alf Bjork's imagery has a bearing on time, memory and space. To be slightly more explicit one could say that while the artist is composing the space, then time and memory are composing the artist.

His paintings, drawings and sculptural objects radiate tranquillity and austerity, but beneath the surfaces we glimpse a much more intense and nervous pulse. Here we find a number of existential states, layers all crowded together to make a kind of human skin landscape – and everywhere we sense traces from different time layers. Each individual expression shows that somewhere it has common resonance base.

When we stand before Alf Bjorks?s pictures we realise that what we actually see are parts of a much larger context. His spatial compositions are from start architecturally magnificent structures. Often it is a matter of ancient buildings, with their carefully measured up cross vaulting and cupolas, but which now – marked by man and time – are given a new colouristic patina. Here we find a fundamental respect for man?s cultural edifices, but there is also a constant desire to rebuild, to find new perspectives.

In his most recent paintings Alf Bjork shows influences from an Icelandic landscape. This is something that also partly gives his paintings a new tone. We stand before an ancient, historically experienced lava landscape. This is a landscape that also shows itself to contain an underlying, almost invisible, colour spectrum. It is as though every crevice conceals a restrained flood of colour that any moment can burst forth.

Viewed from a distance the paintings an sculptural objects give us the impression of being concentrated landscapes – open nature without any real obstacle for the eye that reads them. But if we come nearer we can soon see entirely new and complex maps. Gradually new ways and possibilities decome visible right in the middle of what we first experienced as static and calculated.

Thomas Kjellgren

Translated from the Swedish by Gillian Sjodahl

www.alfbjork.com