200x180cm | 2005 | Oil paint and airbrush on canvas
The work 'Vattenström' forms an important starting point for Persson's oeuvre up till 2011, as the landscape is here for the first time not portrayed as such, but rather depicted as a certain suspense or feeling that is attached to the mental image of a landscape, and for this work in particular the image of a lake. The surface of the canvas reveals the contours and colours of the natural phenomena of a lake, such as its mirroring surface and drifting duckweed, which are moulted into a blurred and almost sinister dreamscape. A pictorial suspense of nature which quite often, looking at her practice in general, calls to mind a melting pot of the work of Old Masters landscape painters, such as Ruysdael, Kasper David Friedrich, Jonh Constable, William Turner, Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne.
A melting pot of figurative resemblances which steadily adapted modernist tropes over the years, resulting in a more abstract and analytical representation of the memory of landscape. These different ways of projecting and analysing memory of the same space on the canvas has points in common with philosophical attempts to map the relation between the construction of the mind and space, such as J.E. Malpas describes in his book 'Place and experience: a philosophical topography': '....this book has also attempted to uncover (through a variety of sketches of the same landscape, through juxtaposition and displacement, through traverse and triangulation), not an 'empty space', but a single complex and interconnected territory- the very territory in which our own identity is grounded and in which the encounter with other persons and with the things in the world is possible'.
Janine Hofland, The Painters Window. ("Vattenström" work N° 1 page 8)
The work 'Vattenström' forms an important starting point for Persson's oeuvre up till 2011, as the landscape is here for the first time not portrayed as such, but rather depicted as a certain suspense or feeling that is attached to the mental image of a landscape, and for this work in particular the image of a lake. The surface of the canvas reveals the contours and colours of the natural phenomena of a lake, such as its mirroring surface and drifting duckweed, which are moulted into a blurred and almost sinister dreamscape. A pictorial suspense of nature which quite often, looking at her practice in general, calls to mind a melting pot of the work of Old Masters landscape painters, such as Ruysdael, Kasper David Friedrich, Jonh Constable, William Turner, Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne.
A melting pot of figurative resemblances which steadily adapted modernist tropes over the years, resulting in a more abstract and analytical representation of the memory of landscape. These different ways of projecting and analysing memory of the same space on the canvas has points in common with philosophical attempts to map the relation between the construction of the mind and space, such as J.E. Malpas describes in his book 'Place and experience: a philosophical topography': '....this book has also attempted to uncover (through a variety of sketches of the same landscape, through juxtaposition and displacement, through traverse and triangulation), not an 'empty space', but a single complex and interconnected territory- the very territory in which our own identity is grounded and in which the encounter with other persons and with the things in the world is possible'.
Janine Hofland, The Painters Window. ("Vattenström" work N° 1 page 8)
