3 klockor at Galleri Format, Malmö

In the series, For your eyes only we see cropped sections of mark-making, flow, viscosities
rendered by daylight and paint:

wisp    streak    splatter    flake    residue run on     sky through    a clear transparent surface.

These sections are framed with varying expanses of white, composing a view and specificspacing for each print. Encased in white ash wooden frames made by the artist, they share the same dimensions (1060 x 1560mm) as the windows of our old studios where the photographs were taken.

In our last months in Flöjen, our former studio collective (1), we had arrived one Monday morning to find all the windows entirely covered in graffiti over the weekend. Housed in a four-storey building emptying out and slated for demolition, the exterior wall on its southern side offered up taggers a large opportune surface area to be broadcast to an audience of daily Nobelvägen traffic and pedestrians. Some of the studios within consequently appeared cloaked in jewel-like tones as the day filtered in through spray-painted glass, others seemingly enclosed by night with layers of pigment obscuring the light. Olof began documenting the windows in each artist’s studio, studying their painterly traces through the lens.

The task of observation, of paying attention to the resolutely ordinary, feels like a key form of orientation in this exhibition.

Dagar, the still lifes of tomatoes belong to a series Olof began painting everyday in the kitchen while on residency in a studio apartment abroad. The live/work space, in this case, set a loose frame for the making: a scale, a duration, materials at hand. Light and fluid, the watercolour sketches are direct in approach, yet deliberate in sensibility and treatment. A friend remarked that over the course of the pandemic, the domestic space had become a compression of all the different spheres usually delineated by distance, their respective place and situated-ness (2). Olof’s way of working resonates with this quotidian rhythm, in that a certain confinement can also draw out an alignment, set a movement, locate a focus – ever so slightly shifting the prism through which we see and engage with the things and beings in our daily lives.

The sound is three clocks ticking mildly out of sync.

Exhibition text by Kah Bee Chow

1 Flöjen was an artist studio collective located on the second floor of Nobelvägen 125, consisting of 25 individual studios. Flöjen was among a number of artist collectives in the building (2004-2020) in Kvarteret Brännaren, Malmö, now  a construction site for future residential housing, schools and a sports centre.

2 Artist Ruth Buchanan quoted in Gilkindon, Emma Jean  “A Covid Winter, holed up in Berlin” https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/01-02-2021/a-covid-winter-holed-up-in-berlin/