Adam Ytterberg Torun och farmor på Vinklumpsvägen by Paulina Sokolow

In a time when our eyes have grown accustomed to consuming images almost exclusively lit by screens, Adam Ytterberg challenges our slackened vision through an analogue sleight of hand, using nothing but his palette of oil paint as his point of departure. By building up colour atmospheres in multiple successive layers, he conjures the charged mood that has become Ytterberg’s hallmark. From the warm and earthy underlayer, a specific shade with the suggestive name Italian brown, pink, neon-like details and highlights pop forth in an illusion of emitting their own inner light, which in turn reflects across the multitude of surfaces found in the paintings: water, mother-of-pearl, fabrics, glass, vegetation, and skin. This curious yet effective painterly technique has the ability to awaken and stimulate perception, allowing us to rediscover the beauty of plasticity, an increasingly rare sensation. Colour is not only surface, but also body.

In Adam Ytterberg’s world, emotional atmospheres are taut with anticipation. As before a party, or something extraordinary about to unfold. We, the viewers, enter at the moment of preparation, at the height of the event, or when the ecstasy has subsided and drifted into a quiet conversation in the kitchen—when space opens for deeper dialogue, clothes have slipped slightly askew, and intimacy has entered. Under the cover of midnight-blue dusk they emerge, one by one: the nose-people, the wooden men, the anchor-army, the lady-trolls, and the glowing snail, all dressed to the nines in sweeping silky garments and droplet-shaped gemstone necklaces. Daylight, with its flat, equalizing brightness, is not for them.

The figures in The Road to Vinklumpen are inscribed within an invisible circle, somewhat reminiscent of the way the Renaissance artist Raphael used to arrange his Madonnas and angels. He placed them within the circle’s divine cycle, as if to underscore eternity and unity. Here, the artist presents his own invented species of holy family: a young non-binary figure in an orange teddy one-piece curled up beside an older figure with a bright pink exaggerated bouffant hairstyle and a low-cut shepherdess gown. They appear slightly dazed, as if they have just finished a feast of waffles and coffee on the flowered picnic cloth. The perspective is skewed and fractured; everything sits at the very front simultaneously—the old-fashioned porcelain, the waffles, and the generous mounds of cream and cloudberry jam. Far in the distance, bluish-pink mountains rise. Perhaps it is Jämtland, or perhaps, as the title suggests, the mythical place Vinklumpen. Our two protagonists seem intimately familiar, and the similarity in their noses even hints that the young one and the elder might be related. In turn, the duo is embraced by a tree-like figure whose head is topped by a glowing carousel. Here, the boundary between the animate and the inanimate becomes fluid, in a kind of ideal of total equality.

Adam Ytterberg is a narrative artist, the kind of story fairy so full of tales that she must begin in one place only to release it and begin anew in another. We who listen are cast across the surface of the canvas and follow willingly into the adventure. The sensation resembles that of childhood: the magical anticipation before a birthday, a trip to the funfair, or the moment before opening an untouched advent calendar. The pulse in the drawing and composition is as queer as the population itself—crooked, pliable, and four-dimensional.

Welcome to the hidden, the headstrong, the multivalent. Welcome to the multitude!

Paulina Sokolow

The artist on his work Painting is a way for me to process emotions and events from my life. My paintings are worlds I create based on stories I write. Each painting is a time-consuming process in which layer upon layer of paint is applied. I begin by sketching the motif on paper. Once the details and perspective work in the drawing, I start sketching it onto the canvas.

My creative practice relates both to my inner life and to an outer place in northwestern Jämtland. I often stay and work there with an older woman on the low fells who runs a mountain pasture with cows and sheep. From this place, old legends tell of strange beings and creatures who lived and acted here in secret. Now that I have painted my own beings and creatures, I let them guide me through different chapters of my life—chapters that have profoundly affected me. One of my beings is Grandmother. She symbolizes my own grandmother, who cared for me and my two sisters during our upbringing. As a child, she was the one who introduced me to fairy tales and comics. Today, authors like Sara Lidman and Virginia Woolf inspire me. Certain objects appear repeatedly in my paintings because I suspect they hold emotional connections for me—especially the carousel. In my late teens I moved to Stockholm to work at Gröna Lund. During that time, I also began exploring my sexuality, which stirred conflicting sensations of fear and delight within me.