Johan Barrett

HORSES and DIVORCES

3 July - 14 August

  • In her autobiographical essay “Good to All That,” the inimitable Joan Didion wrote apropos of divorce: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” Her words here appear to underline the self-preserving avoidance of divorce due to its often great stakes and complexities for the individuals. Didion’s words constitute the tragicomic gist of copping out by being on vacation from divorce, taking a break from the inevitable, and the mundane reality being in temporary suspension mode. Meanwhile, in Patti Smith’s monumental song “Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer (De),” in Part 1: Horses, “the boy” looks at “Johnny” and “Johnny” wants to run, but the movie keeps moving just as planned. For the concept album to which the song belongs, Patti Smith uses the imagery of horses as a metaphor for freedom and liberation, both personally as well as artistically in NYC's rock ‘n’ roll scene of the time.
  • The title of Johan Barrett’s exhibition “HORSES and DIVORCES” frames two oxymoronic words constituting, for him, a personal end and a subsequent new beginning. His recent paintings of motifs which exude escapism, wanderlust and states of frolic, and bodies at evident ease, represent navigating his way through to the other side of a tunnel of the personal collapse of an everyday life that had come to be his and the dark, suffocating clouds of depression. Speaking of finding new love, the love of his life and falling madly in love again over a summer in Stockholm, the artist tells me about, while in even such a state, finding it difficult to anchor in the there and then. Instead, he found allure in the potentialities of a carnivalesque future between the enamored: where to travel, what to see, and such things only yet to happen and materialize. He tells me how the lovers themselves joked about the inability to just indulge in the actual moment of the now. The painted motifs in the exhibition are juxtaposed with sculptures of cigarette smoking: hands holding cigarettes.
  • I generally don’t smoke, but I think of when I’ve enjoyed it. That is in certain very urban and metropolitan cities where I actually love my self-image while doing so, where it amplifies my leisurely state of mind and adds to my cool. The vice of smoking is one that some people juggle almost like breakups. You want to break with it, but you also don’t, and sometimes you just seem to be unable to. You might, at the behest of others—maybe your loved ones, maybe your children—prompt the stop. But there’s something “fuck it, I’m going to live my life” about it, when you choose to do so, that instantly comes to mind with this exhibition in more ways than one.
  • Ashik Zaman

Jarl Ingvarsson

The Pigeon and the Plectrum

Opening Wednesday June 4 16.30 19.00

  • There are moments when the world becomes so thin that color almost passes right through it. In The Pigeon and the Plectrum, Jarl Ingvarsson moves within such a state – a space in between, where everyday objects, painterly gestures, and life’s most enigmatic moments share the same canvas. A kind of presence that may also feel like absence.
  • The title – the pigeon and the plectrum – carries both playfulness and intensity. It evokes a fairytale, or perhaps a song, and maybe that’s exactly what it is: a story in paint, driven by memory, vision, rhythm, and chance. Flowers, oranges, and churches appear alongside lines that cut through layers of pigment like sediment. Painting becomes a language that doesn’t speak – it breathes, it blinks, it calls out and recedes.
  • Jarl Ingvarsson has been called a painter’s painter. His expression is direct, but never simple. Few have stretched the threads of tradition as far as he has without letting them snap. He paints with a gaze constantly seeking new horizons, and a hand that never quite closes – always ready to catch a moment and transform it into something entirely its own.
  • These works were created during a time of change. And yet – between the pigeon and the plectrum, between weight and lightness, between paradise and nothingness – we are met by something that is not bound by time or place. It is a space where painting, like life itself, may hold contradictions while offering a certain stillness.