Alf Björk -Tempera paintings
20.10. – 7.11.2010

Press Release

PAINTINGS CALL UP SLUMBERING POSSIBILITIES

Most of Alf Björk´s imagery has a bearing on time, memory and space. In Alf Björk´s pictures something is being added all the time to something else. Layer by layer builds up his contemporary world – but at the same time it is the gaps and openings that the true new contexts appear. But the most important task of art is not always to reproduce themselves immediately obvious but more to call up all the slumbering possibilities, to open up the dizzy vistas right in the heart of the carefully measured and the familiar.

His paintings radiate tranquillity and austerity but beneath the surface 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 can sense traces from different time layers. Each individual expression show that somewhere it has a common resonance base.

When we stand before Alf Björk´s pictures we realise that what we actually see are part of a much greater context. His spatial compositions are from the start architecturally magnificent structures. Often it is a matter of ancient buildings, with their carefully measured up crossvaulting and cupolas, but which now – marked by man and time – are given a new colouristic patina. Gradually new ways and possibilities become visible right in the middle of what we at first experienced as static and calculated.