Jesper Waldersten Landskapsflykten by Marcel Engdahl

To approach a series of paintings as one might a novel is to allow images to fall into sequence. Gesture becomes action, colour establishes atmosphere, and figures assemble into a dramatis personae. Jesper Waldersten’s (b. 1969) new exhibition Landskapsflykten stages precisely such a process. Combining melancholic precision with a sharply defined cast of characters, his pictorial language here converges with a new thematic terrain: the landscape. Nature itself is transformed into a stage upon which inner movements cast shadows across the painted surface. Through subdued tonalities and finely balanced compositions, Waldersten places this new suite within a Northern European tradition of introspective landscape painting in which nature is less a mirror of the visible world than a vehicle for human experience. Each brushstroke negotiates presence and absence; each memory manifests as a weather phenomenon drifting across the pictorial field. Yet the flight from landscape is also a journey into it: a poetic and polysemous manifesto articulating the relation between exterior and interior, between what can be read and what can only be intuited. The works rotate, reappear, alter their guise. Together they sketch the contours of a story without direction: a flight from inheritance, from other people, from one’s own image – towards a luminous crest on the horizon.

As in a novel, the prologue establishes the structure of what is to come. It is often said that nothing new emerges from the immediate. Waldersten’s working process is consciously protracted, a strategy interpreted as an aesthetic of resistance. But how should one name such a practice? Thematic tapestry, sophisticated composition, or an introspective diary of artistic labour? Landskapsflykten is less an exhibition in the conventional sense than a visually forceful system in which pictorial narrative intersects with a deeply sympathetic artistic doctrine. The landscape here appears as the very concentration of an existential movement: not a place, but an act; a direction rather than a destination. In this pictorial suite the horizon – whether a melancholy tree line or a river bend in evening light – functions as both prologue and epilogue. With a cyclical dramaturgy, the paintings become meeting points of association where humour, absurdity and gravity converge in aesthetic intrigue.

It is through this painterly mode of articulation, saturated with a literary cadence, that the novel’s tonalities are set – tones at once personal and universal, open yet intimate. Here painting is not merely a medium of representation but a therapeutic practice: a process in which the work remains in flux, subject to continual change and renewal. The healing dimension of the practice – what the artist himself describes as “long conversations with myself”– imparts to Landskapsflykten both its urgency and its authenticity.

Stylistically, Waldersten confirms his distinctive painterly hand, where the raw elegance of line yields probing tonalities. In Landskapsflykten he extends these skills to the landscape with psychological tension and nuanced ambiguity. In earlier works the landscape has functioned primarily as scenography for a recurring cast: aristocrats, the bandaged woman, faces, strangers, bodies in dramatic light. These are not portraits in the conventional sense but symbolic entities – vehicles of ideas within a material where time seems suspended. They emerge as chimeras against the backdrop, frozen in states of eternal presence. In a figurative sense, one might read them as akin to commedia dell’arte, where the comic and the tragic interpenetrate in a baroque masquerade. Waldersten’s sometimes severe allegories are marked by their theatrical settings, which in this exhibition break free from the hegemony of genre hierarchies and claim autonomy in the guise of landscape painting.

The experimental devices that characterise these new pictorial ideas operate through rhetorical effect. A restrained, fleeting landscape provides the backdrop to Alldeles för stilla. Here a faintly projecting skeleton, its skull only gradually discernible as the eye adapts, intrudes into the picture as though the painting’s previous life were speaking from the grave—despite the artist’s recurrent injunction not to disturb. In Transparens i månljus the moonlight acts as reagent in an eerie unmasking: the sitter’s identity dissolves before our eyes in an inverted chiaroscuro. Faces are obscured, gender and status neutralised. Figures hover in a timeless interstice, like clouds suspended in a dark, picturesque landscape.

The skulls, by now a Waldersten signature, function as murmurs which, for all their modest appearance, are monumental in resonance. Compositionally, they often occupy the periphery: the shoreline, a bank of cloud, the indeterminate space between earth and sky. They invite the viewer to sharpen the gaze, to allow the eye to wander across the pictorial plane. Like filmic cutaways, they punctuate the current of narrative with rhythmic shifts. This is no accident but a dramaturgical strategy of the highest order: each skull is a whisper in the margin of the novel, a reminder of what is at stake. They transform the works into stages where life and death meet in perpetual choreography – an emblematic interplay extended also to the landscape itself. The pictorial novel thus acquires its macabre undertone in the guise of memento mori, a rupture in illusion.

Waldersten himself describes the suite as a novel. Perhaps it also harbours the memory of a lost childhood world – a place where the creative impulse never quite left the body. Here the artist appears as a child in continual transformation: endlessly gathering, endlessly arranging, immersed in a creativity that turns its back on reason. In this mode the image is not a window but a shield, not revelation but protection. A ruin in which the lost continues to speak through what remains.

For years Waldersten conceived of his practice as a house of corridors, rooms and locked doors. The challenge was to find the keys to parallel projects. An encounter with Picasso’s answers to the great questions opened other dimensions for exploration: the sea, the immense, unending movement. Yet the house gave way to the forest, with its organically flowing spaces – a place in which to lose oneself, to listen, above all to grow. The working method, however, remained the same: overpainting, scraping, “shit upon shit”. The picture becomes a sedimentary body, saturated with time and trial. This painterly archaeology evokes the effect of pentimento, where earlier figures and environments press through the surface, organically re-emerging as symbols of the novel’s multi-dimensional temporality. And although the artist seeks to escape the human as motif – “I have grown tired of humanity as a group” – it continues to insist. Shapes emerge from horizons, demanding their place as memory demands its fragments. Their intrusions are almost comic, as though the protagonist of the novel were to overstep the margins and descend onto the stage.

In the interlude of the exhibition, we encounter the contagiously exuberant Alla ska bada! Like a carnivalesque climax, the intensity rises as figures collide in a scene so boisterous it threatens to burst the canvas. The composition is vertiginous: figures swarm, movement is centrifugal, brushstrokes oscillate between laughter and unease. With a potent chromaticism, colour planes rubbing against one another, the work strikes a condensed chord of grotesque comedy and unsettling intimacy. It is a scene haunted by the spirit of James Ensor – a grotesque depiction of revelry in which comedy and gravity clash. The painting acts as crescendo before the Slutbild resolves the suite in a vanitas panorama: a skeleton reclining upon a soft bed of clouds, a reminder of the ambiguous potential inherent in the image itself.

Formally, the landscapes are marked above all by an ambitious synthetism: expansive unifying surfaces, monumental forms, flat planes of colour, contoured outlines. A perpetual oscillation between melancholy and sublimity courses through them. In the title work Landskapsflykten a figure rises towards the light: are we witnessing an apotheosis, or a metaphor for painting’s own aspirations? In Den röda svanen, by contrast, echoes of Nordic death-mythology in the manner of Gallen-Kallela resound with clarity. These intertextual resonances accentuate the suite’s particular character. It engages history without being absorbed into it; the works function instead as commentaries on what landscape painting might still be today. Can it yet serve as a stage for the trials of human existence?

The enigmatic cast includes figures such as Besökaren, Gestalt före sin tid, Oväntad rörelse, Människan är ett bloss. All suggest movement, metamorphosis, transgression. One senses that the vital force of these works lies concealed in the tensions between layers of pigment. “Perhaps I retreat into the forest; perhaps I step out into rapture. Who knows if I might ignite? No one would be happier than I,” Waldersten remarks, summing up the project’s double direction. There is no triumph in the heroic sense, rather a possibility of illumination. Landskapsflykten is sustained by a consistent technical execution: canvas and panel, overpainting, reworking. Each image is rotated, tested, held in suspension before release. What matters is not painting as product but painting as mode of being. The therapeutic undertone gives the works a pulse at once personal and open, where metaphor becomes play yet also marks an ontological register.

Waldersten’s landscapes should be understood as displacements: a shift from the artist’s role to the autonomy of the image, from visual to intertextual experience. The suite’s narrative structure renders the viewer a wanderer through a deliberately diffuse Swedish noir in Fars hus, through the brush’s caress in the suggestive Sista strykningen, through the mist-veiled På andra sidan where will-o’-the-wisps flicker among trees, or in the figure study Spridd över golvet, where a dramatically lit yet faceless body attests to Waldersten’s anatomical command. The works appear as products of time’s forward drift: “Hour after hour in a solitary landscape. Out in search of something other than myself.” In this exile a new form of image-making is nurtured: a refuge where the self-image of imagination may be reconstructed. Perhaps most clearly of all, Waldersten reveals that the landscape is no longer merely a backdrop but has become the very pathway into a new creative domain.

To leave Waldersten’s sequence is to withdraw slowly from the stage of the novel. Landskapsflykten is no terminus but a map: a route out of the self, perhaps towards the sea, perhaps towards a place where light may win its slow victories. It is an art that unites elegy and satire, structure and impulse, doubt and desire – art fashioned by an artist who stands upright in his uncertainties, with an unquenchable urge to persist in the reconnaissance of the brush. After wandering through Jesper Waldersten’s world, I am convinced: the landscape is our collective escape.