💥✍ In a period of resignation & listlessness, Sven Sandberg's paintings of poseurs are good company to look at: they reflect the resignation & listlessness right back at us. An exhibition cut short (like so many others) was scheduled to end last week at Rathfarnham Castle. Two directives are expressed in the text that foots the vertiginous slideshow online at Berlin Opticians, directives I will disregard (including the castle environment) due to 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵: 𝟏, "small details, noticeable only upon close inspection"; 𝟐, "intended to be viewed in natural light". Hat tips abound here, from "early renaissance" to the shifting mood of the 1920s & '30s - & not to forget the rolling carpet of "contemporaneity". All said & done, nostalgia presides here, plus a reflexive vanity in Sandberg's sitters. Cateract'd loungers lounge around in scumbled & open brush work. Reflexive portraits, they are sitters painting themselves in mirrors or in mind. Heads wriggle out of three-quarter convention & definition as if avoiding prosperity - Snapchat captures. One painting in particular - John Singer Sargent in title, 𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘟 (who was a fin-de-siècle socialite & painting I copied over a decade ago), but James McNeill Whistler in treatment - exposes her kissable neck to reveal a flash of buttercup light that opens up a portrait that ripples the slow & still waters of the present. Sandberg's paintings are not held together by drawing or tone, but by colour: combos of burgundy & pink, pink & viridian, pink & naples yellow. Like nostalgia, pink also presides. A canopy of colour shelters a wan café sitter caught in a juggling orbit of white cup, dislocated arm, baby-red hair, slit eyes, black jug & back again. These silver screen & Great Depression archetypes recall other archetypes by Edward Hopper & Alex Katz, & lesser known paintings like Ivan Gregorovitch Olinsky's 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 (1939). Here their gaze is more somnolent. They slide back in time & space, eyes sometimes pupiless or jaundiced as if just born into a world of soft interiors that cushion their fall at every misstep. Safe as houses they say. Fuck - I miss real exhibitions🖤

APRIL 22, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night