THE DEMONIC mask to the right – in reality more than a meter high – is one of the thirty or so pieces that make up the work Paradise Lost from 2009. The face is of course

originally Boris Karloff’s, and is taken from The Mummy, a type of B-movie full of horror and mysticism and love that Håfström always has had a liking for. The fact that Karloff’s character is an enigmatic Egyptian who has been called back to life after having been buried in the days of the Pharaohs, is in a way parallel to the recalling of a lost world that Håfström himself seems to try to set about. In many ways, the whole work hints at a descent into a long ago sunken inner life of half forgotten or repressed ghosts

In the impressive renewal that Håfström’s art has undergone in the last ten years, Paradise Lost makes up one of the high-lights. It was shown at the Venice Biennale 2009 together with a somewhat earlier work, The Eternal Return, which is also built up by a great number of cut-out wood panels. Here the emblematic Mr Walker (alter ego of the Phantom) is the central figure, but Robinson Crusoe is also there along with soldiers, ship wrecks, war machines, wild animals and skulls – a mosaic of visual quotes from the mythic worlds of popular culture and a small boy’s room. As in Paradise Lost, figures and objects have a pronounced quality of paper dolls and set pieces, and the impression of theatrical staging is enhanced by the fact that the separate pieces are meant to be reposi-tioned at each new installation.

Just like Karloff’s nightmarish phantom, the iconic horizons of The Eternal Return serve as a reminder that film and other ex-pressions of mass culture have been an important source of inspiration for the artist – and not just in his rebirth of later years. Newspaper photographs and cartoons, post cards and other illustrated printed matter contributed greatly in bringing forth the works with which Håfström entered into art life about 40 years ago. I will shortly look at some of these paintings, but let us first stay a little longer in his latest work. Its fundamental tone is dark and deeply melancholic, and the stage is inhabited by some of the more symbolically loaded objects and monsters of the Western world.

The dead figure of Christ, in a shape borrowed from Holbein, but in a poisonous green, is on lit-de-parade next to a mythologi-cal couple like Leda and the swan, or next to a Medusa head – just as stylized and as green

Paradise Lost?

FAMILY SECRETSTURIN ITALY JAN HÅFSTRÖM 4 NOVEMBER 2010. SWEDEN. 10€

No 1 • 2010 • Håfström & co

2 3

in colour. The large opened book is another example of a quotation just as sign-like: big and clumsy like a medieval foliant, with the text set in two tight columns – like the bibles that inaugurated the epoch of the printed word. The book and the printed word have long been recurring themes in Håfström’s work, mostly associated with conflicting feelings – of elemental be-longing, but also of a kind of binding and repressive order. This ambiguity is also found here in this open book, enormously enlarged as an image of collective memory, a Western canon of myths and ideas. And simultaneously, in its massive materiality, it resembles law tablets, a codex bringing to mind blind literalism – or perhaps that kind of obscurantists in capes and conical black hoods that constitute another part in this puzzle.

Other pieces give far more pronounced associations to violence and assaults: a German fighter plane from the Nazi era (skulls painted on the nose), or a blindfolded woman with her hands tied back (as if lined up for an execution). Actually, most motifs have some association to death: the hand gun and the swords, of course, as well as the child-sized coffins or the winged monster. But also the strangely crouched figure with its head deep down betweens its knees: a body as secluded and as discon-nected from the surrounding world as a rocky island in the sea, a Böcklinesque Island of the Dead, in whose center a dark cave or a grave seems to open.

The different parts of this work contain many details which ”rhyme” or correspond to each other in other ways. Medusa’s head is a crawling snake pit, and the tail of the fabled beast lashes out like a whip. But the curled reptile-like movement is also to be found in Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which coils up like a snake’s tail. In Smithson’s work this sign is perhaps primarily a metaphor for death or even for a hypnotic suction towards the abyss. But, as all archetypes, the snake–spiral is also a kind of universal hieroglyph that in itself condenses many different and even con-tradictory meanings. The intention of this constellation of more or less well-known cultural fragments is of course not to build a kind of rebus with a fixed meaning, but rather to let the parts set each other in motion, to create space for imagination, and so to muse on what kind of “meaning” they can possibly harbour. Essentially, as the title suggests, it is perhaps a labour of sorrow.

The ”simplicity” that Håfström has attained here, feels new in many ways, but is also strongly tied to earlier works. The accentuated contours and the flatness of playing card emblems in the motifs feel quite congenial with a certain melodramatic vein, which has grown throughout the years. On the other hand, a preference for the flat and sign-like has always been present in his painting. Of course, at times he has left the wall in order to work with objects and with space. And certainly, his paintings have over time been experiments in many different directions. He has, to put it simply, been in motion – and the variations in appearance have been many. But the continuity is just as striking – partly, of course, in his touch, in the tactile qualities of the painted surface, but also on the level of “contents”, in the fantasies and conflicts that dominate his art. And with the works from the last ten years it may even be argued that he again and with renewed force has returned to his beginnings.

His paintings from the 1960’s have also made open use of the models taken from the anonymous archives supplied by mass media. It was a way of quoting reality which felt new and liberating, in direct opposition to the idea of the ”autonomous” work of art as well as to the “expressive” aesthetics cultivated in the 1950’s. But

realistic illusion was not the aim of these representational motifs. What is instead stressed, is the mythic qualities of the motif. In my eyes, a painting like The Tropics (from 1968) looks like it is celebrating the memory of a childhood – one of the artist’s many variations on the theme of returning. You feel transported to the rainforest of adventure books, where the green jungle spreads over the canvas like the dream of a frontier, unbound by society or the respon-sibility of words, liberated from the soli-tude of culture.

The Forest (from the same year) is based on a page in a Tarzan comic, and the relationship to the model is not particularly ironical. The artificial colouring, the exoti-cism, a great deal of the trite jungle roman-ticism is still there in the painting. But it is also an enlargement, which makes the primeval forest seem more distant, as if it were the flora of another planet, another geological era. And whichever way you choose to see it, The Forest is, of course, an inner landscape. It contains no natural observation, but is filled with echoes from different directions: dreams and fantasies floating around in our consciousness, brought to the fore by the painting. There-fore, its unreality is not entirely unfamiliar. It reminds us of a childish experience of the world, and perhaps it is this imaginary encounter with an earlier life that gives The Forest, in spite of its considerable size, such an intimacy.

Parallels are not difficult to find between motifs like these and the enraptured worlds of idols and adventures in, for example, The Eternal Return. As an element of this boy-hood romanticism the artist has also added a painted and cut out version of the Island of the Dead. Böcklin, too, has been a central reference for Håfström since the 1960’s. At that time he made an instructive drawing in Indian ink, bringing out the character of stage set and cardboard figures of Böcklin’s motifs. That atmosphere, as well as Böcklin’s way of operating with sets of vis-ual formulas, was something that Håfström appreciated and saw as “modern” – and which he himself has held on to, not least in his recent scenographic works. But he has also painted a picture in a traditional format (2002) where he gives his interpreta-tion of the Island of the Dead – named (after Jules Verne) The Mysterious Island.

The painting can be read in different ways. Here too you find the aura of boy-hood adventures – perhaps related to the dreaming childhood of the artist. In many recent paintings he seems to seek his origins in different maternal and paternal figures. An island in the sea, however dark and brooding, is already in itself an image of refuge. And furthermore, if you can rest in-side the island itself – does it not then appear as a doubly sheltered place: the really maternal grave, where you are back in the womb, surrounded by this motherly protection? And if the island is a fantasy about the body of the mother – is not the submarine, which Håfström has added, an equally obvious boyhood dream of the paternal phallic body? An armoured manli-ness tightly cruising around the dreamlike fortress of womanhood. If you want to see the painting as a statement about the masculine and the feminine, the testimony is a rather pessimistic one.

But the motif may be read in other ways too. The drama is enacted on several differ-ent levels and it also contains elements of cultural criticism. Such perspectives have often been present in Håfström´s painting, not least in works of later years – and in Paradise Lost this dimension is indeed conspicuous. Some of the name plates of the installation point out authors and artists that have fiercely attacked the colonial, philosophical or gender foundations of our civilization. Certain references may be obscure to some viewers – but the bright red panels (and the often hypnotic names) are not just literary but pictorial elements. And what does it matter if you don´t know the precise origin of the various motifs? For example: the dumptruck emptying a big sheet of black and sticky sludge is an allusion (surely unfamiliar to many viewers) to an art project by Robert Smithson. But the picture in itself gives a strong image of environmental destruction – and that is probably more important in this context. The work, after all, is one long parade of equally ominous signs – of monstrous life forms, religious fanatics, technological murder machines... In all its “romantic” apparition it is a very sombre, even apoca-lyptic vision.

Douglas Feuk (Translation Birgitta Danielsson)

Walker’s escape, 2010

The Return 1967, private collectionSid 23. Lars Gustafsson.

Böcklin motifs, 1969. Private collection.

2 3

in colour. The large opened book is another example of a quotation just as sign-like: big and clumsy like a medieval foliant, with the text set in two tight columns – like the bibles that inaugurated the epoch of the printed word. The book and the printed word have long been recurring themes in Håfström’s work, mostly associated with conflicting feelings – of elemental be-longing, but also of a kind of binding and repressive order. This ambiguity is also found here in this open book, enormously enlarged as an image of collective memory, a Western canon of myths and ideas. And simultaneously, in its massive materiality, it resembles law tablets, a codex bringing to mind blind literalism – or perhaps that kind of obscurantists in capes and conical black hoods that constitute another part in this puzzle.

Other pieces give far more pronounced associations to violence and assaults: a German fighter plane from the Nazi era (skulls painted on the nose), or a blindfolded woman with her hands tied back (as if lined up for an execution). Actually, most motifs have some association to death: the hand gun and the swords, of course, as well as the child-sized coffins or the winged monster. But also the strangely crouched figure with its head deep down betweens its knees: a body as secluded and as discon-nected from the surrounding world as a rocky island in the sea, a Böcklinesque Island of the Dead, in whose center a dark cave or a grave seems to open.

The different parts of this work contain many details which ”rhyme” or correspond to each other in other ways. Medusa’s head is a crawling snake pit, and the tail of the fabled beast lashes out like a whip. But the curled reptile-like movement is also to be found in Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which coils up like a snake’s tail. In Smithson’s work this sign is perhaps primarily a metaphor for death or even for a hypnotic suction towards the abyss. But, as all archetypes, the snake–spiral is also a kind of universal hieroglyph that in itself condenses many different and even con-tradictory meanings. The intention of this constellation of more or less well-known cultural fragments is of course not to build a kind of rebus with a fixed meaning, but rather to let the parts set each other in motion, to create space for imagination, and so to muse on what kind of “meaning” they can possibly harbour. Essentially, as the title suggests, it is perhaps a labour of sorrow.

The ”simplicity” that Håfström has attained here, feels new in many ways, but is also strongly tied to earlier works. The accentuated contours and the flatness of playing card emblems in the motifs feel quite congenial with a certain melodramatic vein, which has grown throughout the years. On the other hand, a preference for the flat and sign-like has always been present in his painting. Of course, at times he has left the wall in order to work with objects and with space. And certainly, his paintings have over time been experiments in many different directions. He has, to put it simply, been in motion – and the variations in appearance have been many. But the continuity is just as striking – partly, of course, in his touch, in the tactile qualities of the painted surface, but also on the level of “contents”, in the fantasies and conflicts that dominate his art. And with the works from the last ten years it may even be argued that he again and with renewed force has returned to his beginnings.

His paintings from the 1960’s have also made open use of the models taken from the anonymous archives supplied by mass media. It was a way of quoting reality which felt new and liberating, in direct opposition to the idea of the ”autonomous” work of art as well as to the “expressive” aesthetics cultivated in the 1950’s. But

realistic illusion was not the aim of these representational motifs. What is instead stressed, is the mythic qualities of the motif. In my eyes, a painting like The Tropics (from 1968) looks like it is celebrating the memory of a childhood – one of the artist’s many variations on the theme of returning. You feel transported to the rainforest of adventure books, where the green jungle spreads over the canvas like the dream of a frontier, unbound by society or the respon-sibility of words, liberated from the soli-tude of culture.

The Forest (from the same year) is based on a page in a Tarzan comic, and the relationship to the model is not particularly ironical. The artificial colouring, the exoti-cism, a great deal of the trite jungle roman-ticism is still there in the painting. But it is also an enlargement, which makes the primeval forest seem more distant, as if it were the flora of another planet, another geological era. And whichever way you choose to see it, The Forest is, of course, an inner landscape. It contains no natural observation, but is filled with echoes from different directions: dreams and fantasies floating around in our consciousness, brought to the fore by the painting. There-fore, its unreality is not entirely unfamiliar. It reminds us of a childish experience of the world, and perhaps it is this imaginary encounter with an earlier life that gives The Forest, in spite of its considerable size, such an intimacy.

Parallels are not difficult to find between motifs like these and the enraptured worlds of idols and adventures in, for example, The Eternal Return. As an element of this boy-hood romanticism the artist has also added a painted and cut out version of the Island of the Dead. Böcklin, too, has been a central reference for Håfström since the 1960’s. At that time he made an instructive drawing in Indian ink, bringing out the character of stage set and cardboard figures of Böcklin’s motifs. That atmosphere, as well as Böcklin’s way of operating with sets of vis-ual formulas, was something that Håfström appreciated and saw as “modern” – and which he himself has held on to, not least in his recent scenographic works. But he has also painted a picture in a traditional format (2002) where he gives his interpreta-tion of the Island of the Dead – named (after Jules Verne) The Mysterious Island.

The painting can be read in different ways. Here too you find the aura of boy-hood adventures – perhaps related to the dreaming childhood of the artist. In many recent paintings he seems to seek his origins in different maternal and paternal figures. An island in the sea, however dark and brooding, is already in itself an image of refuge. And furthermore, if you can rest in-side the island itself – does it not then appear as a doubly sheltered place: the really maternal grave, where you are back in the womb, surrounded by this motherly protection? And if the island is a fantasy about the body of the mother – is not the submarine, which Håfström has added, an equally obvious boyhood dream of the paternal phallic body? An armoured manli-ness tightly cruising around the dreamlike fortress of womanhood. If you want to see the painting as a statement about the masculine and the feminine, the testimony is a rather pessimistic one.

But the motif may be read in other ways too. The drama is enacted on several differ-ent levels and it also contains elements of cultural criticism. Such perspectives have often been present in Håfström´s painting, not least in works of later years – and in Paradise Lost this dimension is indeed conspicuous. Some of the name plates of the installation point out authors and artists that have fiercely attacked the colonial, philosophical or gender foundations of our civilization. Certain references may be obscure to some viewers – but the bright red panels (and the often hypnotic names) are not just literary but pictorial elements. And what does it matter if you don´t know the precise origin of the various motifs? For example: the dumptruck emptying a big sheet of black and sticky sludge is an allusion (surely unfamiliar to many viewers) to an art project by Robert Smithson. But the picture in itself gives a strong image of environmental destruction – and that is probably more important in this context. The work, after all, is one long parade of equally ominous signs – of monstrous life forms, religious fanatics, technological murder machines... In all its “romantic” apparition it is a very sombre, even apoca-lyptic vision.

Douglas Feuk (Translation Birgitta Danielsson)

Walker’s escape, 2010

The Return 1967, private collectionSid 23. Lars Gustafsson.

Böcklin motifs, 1969. Private collection.

4 5

Niclas Östlind: Each part of Den eviga återkomsten (The Eternal Return) – and there are many – has the characteristic of an object: the contours of the sawn pieces and the comic book-like stylisation create almost graphic clarity. At the same time, the work is characterised by an evasive streak, both the wide distribution within the space and the number of parts, making it far from easy to view in a simple way. It also changes when it is exhibited and you could liken the various presentations to performances (as in the theatre). How do you see the relationship between the indi-vidual pieces and the whole work and what guides you when putting it together?

Jan Håfström: I think you’re right – each hanging is a kind of theatre. A ‘magic theatre’ as Hermann Hesse would put it: where you observe scenes from your past, but transformed to a symbolic level. For example, the footprint in the sand. Whose? Or the wreck of a ship half hidden in the sand. From where? Not to mention the ‘Isle of the Dead’, the end of the line withits dark cypresses and tombs carved out of the cliff. A place of emptiness – and yet, due to its dark-ness, it also possesses an erotic

element that is creative,

full of life. Stig Dagerman wrote somewhere that

love is death’s sister. When did the journey

begin? As a child in Sunday school in the 40s, I sat in front

of a large sandpit, a desert landscape in miniature where the teacher moved figures around and told us about the life of Jesus. Small sawn-out figures: a Good Samaritan, a faithless woman to be stoned to death, roman soldiers, palm trees. In some incomprehensible way, these scenes became a sort of model for my own life, the notion that there is a path and a truth

worth seeking. That the way had already been staked out. That life, in some way, is predestined. But, I don’t know. I’m groping, of course. What I try to do as an artist is put the fragments in order and create a meaningful pattern. Perhaps it is as you say: evasive. I think it is an attempt to abolish matter, ‘the real’. The sawn out and painted fragments are physical objects, hard, but the larger shape has to be transparent, empty, abstract. And it changes, as you say, from place to place.

NÖ: The Phantom is a literary figure (even if the context is ‘low’ popular culture) and with him in your pictures he conveys sto-ries and memories that partly live their own life. Not just here, but throughout your work, there is a proximity to literature and narration – often in the form of frag- mentary pictures that fire the imagination, as well as a more epic kind. In addition, you have theuncommon

ability to express yourself

in text, as Ola Billgren did. Seen from a historical perspec-tive, this conduct is often regarded with scepticism and many have

raised a warning finger against every- thing not strictly belonging to painting: Goethe’s ‘Bilde Künstler, rede nicht’ has provided the tone, in various intensities, to both practitioners of art as well as the academic aesthetic. What is your opinion of the relationship between image and text in a wider context and what role does literature play in your own creative process?

JH: By chance in summer 2000, I once again saw Mr Walker in a frame from a comic book – standing in the darkness in front of a bright window – and I was certainly taken by the precision of the drawing and its graphical nature. But I also recognised some-thing else. I had made that picture before, in 1966. Back then I had called it ‘Återkomsten’ (The Return) and it shows a man, a house and a tree. The scene had the simplicity of a Russian icon. When I enlarged the Walker

image and reduced the colours to just four, I realised that something had happened. Was this painting? The question seemed irrelevant. The message was the essen-tial thing. And it didn’t matter that I had taken over someone else’s design. Nor that my new painting glowed like a traffic sign. Nobody would go by without asking: Who is he? What’s he doing there?

Walker then became the force that held everything together during the flood of images that followed. He was the key figure in the drama that inexorably demanded to be staged. Yes, I felt like a medium for feelings and conceptions partly beyond my control. Just like the time, at Sunday school, when I was influenced by something incomprehensible that I found both frightening and attractive. A text, a voice that ordered me to go my own way, discover my life. He, Walker, was my guide. Another important influence was Joseph Conrad. The long river in ‘Heart of Darkness’, the shifting from place to place, from station to station, is the same story, the same morality play that I saw in the sandpit. A kind of manifestation made human. A descent into darkness. The remote station and Kurtz are the terrible opposites of every-thing we consider holy. At the same time, it is also an image of us. That we find ourselves in the inferno, in hell.

NÖ: Den eviga återkomsten (The Eternal Return) has an unmistakable ‘Håfström-esque’ character – the fictional tone and movement towards darkness and the unknown – but it also marks something new, not least stylistically. How has the piece developed and what is its relation to your previous work?

JH: The work we’re discussing is per-haps an attempt to create a synthesis of some kind. A survey showing where every- thing has come from, demonstrating how it all fits together. That’s why I’ve often included drawings from my child-hood – as some kind of original works, ‘sketches’. Which means the gap between me and the boy who drew them no longer exists. There’s a channel between him and me, a connection that’s about pain and pleasure. And perhaps this completely new world has come through this. A myth about paradise? The dream of virgin land beyond good and evil? I don’t know. Or is it just the time when he drew and told stories?

Childhood was, for me, that time in my life when I discovered loneliness. It

was the bunker from where all tales begin. Much later, thanks to Maurice Blanchot – above all in the essay ‘Une scène primi-tive?’ – I encountered a child confusingly like myself. It was both liberating and sad that someone had been in that very place before me. All feelings of worth contain their very opposite, don’t they?

Narrative is very important in my art. I love Repin’s painting of the man who returns home after many years in a Siberian prison. He has just thrown open the door and stands in the middle of the room; four people who thought he was dead and gone for ever are gazing at him. That moment is so grip-ping and beautiful. No one would claim it is not ‘painting’. So what’s the pro-blem? I think modernism and Green-berg did art a disservice when they asserted painting’s absolute autonomy and wanted to set the limits of its special character as a medium. It just leads to atrophy and desiccation, to a ‘purity’ that sooner or later has to be infected and soiled to regain some life. Profic-iency, technique, has never really inte-rested me. Only expression. That’s why I’ve felt free to try different things: write criticism, make movies. These forms, or styles, that I adopt as a painter are thrown away when they have served their purpose. That’s why my artistic progress is a series of unplanned de- partures. At the same time, I have never hesitated about which path to take. That’s what Ulf Linde meant when he wrote that Jan Håfström has always trimmed his sails to every wind, but the significant thing is which material the sails are made of, not which way the wind is blowing. No one has said it better than that.

NÖ: And finally: childhood, adventure, desire, death – what is it exactly that returns endlessly for all time?

JH: Perhaps I don’t see the difference the same way as you do. Certainly I see that a tree in a coffin (from the 80s) has another physical presence than a fleeing Walker, 30 years later. But this means nothing. You list some of the more serious the-mes currently associated with my name. Here too, I don’t think there are any clear demarcations. Everything is ‘evasive’. It’s all the same thing. Everything is part of a dialogue – and that’s the point. Dialogue. The common experience. Being human. To witness this life.

The Eternal Return Four questions, four answers Niclas Östlind/Jan Håfström

4 5

Niclas Östlind: Each part of Den eviga återkomsten (The Eternal Return) – and there are many – has the characteristic of an object: the contours of the sawn pieces and the comic book-like stylisation create almost graphic clarity. At the same time, the work is characterised by an evasive streak, both the wide distribution within the space and the number of parts, making it far from easy to view in a simple way. It also changes when it is exhibited and you could liken the various presentations to performances (as in the theatre). How do you see the relationship between the indi-vidual pieces and the whole work and what guides you when putting it together?

Jan Håfström: I think you’re right – each hanging is a kind of theatre. A ‘magic theatre’ as Hermann Hesse would put it: where you observe scenes from your past, but transformed to a symbolic level. For example, the footprint in the sand. Whose? Or the wreck of a ship half hidden in the sand. From where? Not to mention the ‘Isle of the Dead’, the end of the line withits dark cypresses and tombs carved out of the cliff. A place of emptiness – and yet, due to its dark-ness, it also possesses an erotic

element that is creative,

full of life. Stig Dagerman wrote somewhere that

love is death’s sister. When did the journey

begin? As a child in Sunday school in the 40s, I sat in front

of a large sandpit, a desert landscape in miniature where the teacher moved figures around and told us about the life of Jesus. Small sawn-out figures: a Good Samaritan, a faithless woman to be stoned to death, roman soldiers, palm trees. In some incomprehensible way, these scenes became a sort of model for my own life, the notion that there is a path and a truth

worth seeking. That the way had already been staked out. That life, in some way, is predestined. But, I don’t know. I’m groping, of course. What I try to do as an artist is put the fragments in order and create a meaningful pattern. Perhaps it is as you say: evasive. I think it is an attempt to abolish matter, ‘the real’. The sawn out and painted fragments are physical objects, hard, but the larger shape has to be transparent, empty, abstract. And it changes, as you say, from place to place.

NÖ: The Phantom is a literary figure (even if the context is ‘low’ popular culture) and with him in your pictures he conveys sto-ries and memories that partly live their own life. Not just here, but throughout your work, there is a proximity to literature and narration – often in the form of frag- mentary pictures that fire the imagination, as well as a more epic kind. In addition, you have theuncommon

ability to express yourself

in text, as Ola Billgren did. Seen from a historical perspec-tive, this conduct is often regarded with scepticism and many have

raised a warning finger against every- thing not strictly belonging to painting: Goethe’s ‘Bilde Künstler, rede nicht’ has provided the tone, in various intensities, to both practitioners of art as well as the academic aesthetic. What is your opinion of the relationship between image and text in a wider context and what role does literature play in your own creative process?

JH: By chance in summer 2000, I once again saw Mr Walker in a frame from a comic book – standing in the darkness in front of a bright window – and I was certainly taken by the precision of the drawing and its graphical nature. But I also recognised some-thing else. I had made that picture before, in 1966. Back then I had called it ‘Återkomsten’ (The Return) and it shows a man, a house and a tree. The scene had the simplicity of a Russian icon. When I enlarged the Walker

image and reduced the colours to just four, I realised that something had happened. Was this painting? The question seemed irrelevant. The message was the essen-tial thing. And it didn’t matter that I had taken over someone else’s design. Nor that my new painting glowed like a traffic sign. Nobody would go by without asking: Who is he? What’s he doing there?

Walker then became the force that held everything together during the flood of images that followed. He was the key figure in the drama that inexorably demanded to be staged. Yes, I felt like a medium for feelings and conceptions partly beyond my control. Just like the time, at Sunday school, when I was influenced by something incomprehensible that I found both frightening and attractive. A text, a voice that ordered me to go my own way, discover my life. He, Walker, was my guide. Another important influence was Joseph Conrad. The long river in ‘Heart of Darkness’, the shifting from place to place, from station to station, is the same story, the same morality play that I saw in the sandpit. A kind of manifestation made human. A descent into darkness. The remote station and Kurtz are the terrible opposites of every-thing we consider holy. At the same time, it is also an image of us. That we find ourselves in the inferno, in hell.

NÖ: Den eviga återkomsten (The Eternal Return) has an unmistakable ‘Håfström-esque’ character – the fictional tone and movement towards darkness and the unknown – but it also marks something new, not least stylistically. How has the piece developed and what is its relation to your previous work?

JH: The work we’re discussing is per-haps an attempt to create a synthesis of some kind. A survey showing where every- thing has come from, demonstrating how it all fits together. That’s why I’ve often included drawings from my child-hood – as some kind of original works, ‘sketches’. Which means the gap between me and the boy who drew them no longer exists. There’s a channel between him and me, a connection that’s about pain and pleasure. And perhaps this completely new world has come through this. A myth about paradise? The dream of virgin land beyond good and evil? I don’t know. Or is it just the time when he drew and told stories?

Childhood was, for me, that time in my life when I discovered loneliness. It

was the bunker from where all tales begin. Much later, thanks to Maurice Blanchot – above all in the essay ‘Une scène primi-tive?’ – I encountered a child confusingly like myself. It was both liberating and sad that someone had been in that very place before me. All feelings of worth contain their very opposite, don’t they?

Narrative is very important in my art. I love Repin’s painting of the man who returns home after many years in a Siberian prison. He has just thrown open the door and stands in the middle of the room; four people who thought he was dead and gone for ever are gazing at him. That moment is so grip-ping and beautiful. No one would claim it is not ‘painting’. So what’s the pro-blem? I think modernism and Green-berg did art a disservice when they asserted painting’s absolute autonomy and wanted to set the limits of its special character as a medium. It just leads to atrophy and desiccation, to a ‘purity’ that sooner or later has to be infected and soiled to regain some life. Profic-iency, technique, has never really inte-rested me. Only expression. That’s why I’ve felt free to try different things: write criticism, make movies. These forms, or styles, that I adopt as a painter are thrown away when they have served their purpose. That’s why my artistic progress is a series of unplanned de- partures. At the same time, I have never hesitated about which path to take. That’s what Ulf Linde meant when he wrote that Jan Håfström has always trimmed his sails to every wind, but the significant thing is which material the sails are made of, not which way the wind is blowing. No one has said it better than that.

NÖ: And finally: childhood, adventure, desire, death – what is it exactly that returns endlessly for all time?

JH: Perhaps I don’t see the difference the same way as you do. Certainly I see that a tree in a coffin (from the 80s) has another physical presence than a fleeing Walker, 30 years later. But this means nothing. You list some of the more serious the-mes currently associated with my name. Here too, I don’t think there are any clear demarcations. Everything is ‘evasive’. It’s all the same thing. Everything is part of a dialogue – and that’s the point. Dialogue. The common experience. Being human. To witness this life.

The Eternal Return Four questions, four answers Niclas Östlind/Jan Håfström

6 7

The Eternal Return, 2003. Åmells collection

6 7

The Eternal Return, 2003. Åmells collection

8 9

La Biennale di Venezia, Arsenale, 2009

Lotta Melin and dancers at sunset in Parco delle Rimembranze, Venice , June 5, 2009The Foundation, 2006

8 9

La Biennale di Venezia, Arsenale, 2009

Lotta Melin and dancers at sunset in Parco delle Rimembranze, Venice , June 5, 2009The Foundation, 2006

10 11

The Mysterious Island, 2002. Private collection.

10 11

The Mysterious Island, 2002. Private collection.

12 13

12 13

14 15

Germania, 2010.

14 15

Germania, 2010.

16 17

Corpus, 1990 The Stranger, 2010

16 17

Corpus, 1990 The Stranger, 2010

18 19

Paradise Lost, 2009

18 19

Paradise Lost, 2009

20 21

Paradise Lost, 2009

20 21

Paradise Lost, 2009

22 23

IMMERSING oneself in Jan Håfström’s works can sometimes be like going astray in a visual hall of echoes, where a mass of images from different times, places and

situations intermingle, collide, form new patterns and new meanings and dispatch us to the inner recesses of our memories. To our childhood. To our dreams and nightmares. But also to a multitude of magazines, books and movies. And to other art.

The colour fields that fill the room he has created for the first exhibition of the “Odd Weeks” series – geometrically black, yellow, red, like the Belgian and German flags, interrupted only by a map-like green, organic shape – hide numerous memories that are vital to Håfström. Memories from

his time at the legendary P.S. One in New York in the second half of the ’70s, and of the mythical young German artist Blinky Palermo’s last exhibition just before he left P.S. One and New York and died mysteri-ously on the Maldives. The memory of Jo-seph Conrad’s harrowing novel “Heart of Darkness” – isn’t that the Kongo River that winds like a red artery through the green map-image? All these echoes, mingling with our own thoughts. To me, the intense colour fields exude a feeling of ruthless violence, of anonymous brutality.

Håfström’s works have always incor-porated a political undertone, often allu-ding to moments of horrific repression: the Paris Commune, Chile, Bosnia and

Congo. But stronger than this is always a longing for some form of absolute origins beyond – or perhaps predating – culture. The two texts – one by Tacitus, the Roman, and the other by Conrad – on the outside of the room evoke this feeling, if it wasn’t already there: appalling but seductive.

But a few works are also hung on the outside of the room – four terse paintings after Blinky Palermo, echoing the room inside; and three paintings from the series with Mr Walker, constantly on the move, a shadow from the world of comic strips who has appeared in Håfström’s paintings in later years, sprinting between grueso-me death – and romance. Here the deep seriousness of the main room is brought back

down to earth and into the world of child-hood and the boy’s room. The echo grows louder, the memories more numerous, the dissonances richer and grander: the comic strip character Mr Walker, Ground Zero, Blinky Palermo, Tacitus, Belgian Congo, P.S. One in New York, Conrad and – not to forget – Jan Håfström’s way of drawing and painting, so precise and yet so inimitably awkward, in some ways keeping a distance, but with a personal note that points straight to his earliest works in the Moderna Museet collection, for instance the fantastic “Sko-gen” (The Forest) from 1967-68. The Heart of Darkness is never far away.

Lars Nittve. Director, Moderna Museet

Blinky Palermo never went to Belgian Congo

Diana Palmer, 2010. Private collection

Wallpaintings for ”Blinky Palermo never went to Belgian Congo”, Moderna Museet 2002

22 23

IMMERSING oneself in Jan Håfström’s works can sometimes be like going astray in a visual hall of echoes, where a mass of images from different times, places and

situations intermingle, collide, form new patterns and new meanings and dispatch us to the inner recesses of our memories. To our childhood. To our dreams and nightmares. But also to a multitude of magazines, books and movies. And to other art.

The colour fields that fill the room he has created for the first exhibition of the “Odd Weeks” series – geometrically black, yellow, red, like the Belgian and German flags, interrupted only by a map-like green, organic shape – hide numerous memories that are vital to Håfström. Memories from

his time at the legendary P.S. One in New York in the second half of the ’70s, and of the mythical young German artist Blinky Palermo’s last exhibition just before he left P.S. One and New York and died mysteri-ously on the Maldives. The memory of Jo-seph Conrad’s harrowing novel “Heart of Darkness” – isn’t that the Kongo River that winds like a red artery through the green map-image? All these echoes, mingling with our own thoughts. To me, the intense colour fields exude a feeling of ruthless violence, of anonymous brutality.

Håfström’s works have always incor-porated a political undertone, often allu-ding to moments of horrific repression: the Paris Commune, Chile, Bosnia and

Congo. But stronger than this is always a longing for some form of absolute origins beyond – or perhaps predating – culture. The two texts – one by Tacitus, the Roman, and the other by Conrad – on the outside of the room evoke this feeling, if it wasn’t already there: appalling but seductive.

But a few works are also hung on the outside of the room – four terse paintings after Blinky Palermo, echoing the room inside; and three paintings from the series with Mr Walker, constantly on the move, a shadow from the world of comic strips who has appeared in Håfström’s paintings in later years, sprinting between grueso-me death – and romance. Here the deep seriousness of the main room is brought back

down to earth and into the world of child-hood and the boy’s room. The echo grows louder, the memories more numerous, the dissonances richer and grander: the comic strip character Mr Walker, Ground Zero, Blinky Palermo, Tacitus, Belgian Congo, P.S. One in New York, Conrad and – not to forget – Jan Håfström’s way of drawing and painting, so precise and yet so inimitably awkward, in some ways keeping a distance, but with a personal note that points straight to his earliest works in the Moderna Museet collection, for instance the fantastic “Sko-gen” (The Forest) from 1967-68. The Heart of Darkness is never far away.

Lars Nittve. Director, Moderna Museet

Blinky Palermo never went to Belgian Congo

Diana Palmer, 2010. Private collection

Wallpaintings for ”Blinky Palermo never went to Belgian Congo”, Moderna Museet 2002

THE DISTURBING and liberating thing about a painting is not that it shows us a way to paint but that it shows us a way of living. This is so-

mething we can perhaps say, but what can it mean? It can mean that the picture we see becomes the entrance to an experience which escapes all regulation, all rational control, an experience of totality in which the boundary between myself and the world is unclear, impossible to draw. It’s remarkable, you can stand for a long time looking at a picture, everything looks calm on the surface: and yet there is a whole life at stake here. Because one of us has sen-sed what he is part of, what he bears within himself: the seconds, the millions of years.

At its deepest level I think this is an ex-perience of kinship, of not being alone, not being alien. Is that not the magnificent thing, not being alone? Is it not that which makes pictures meaningful and necessary, that they encourage us to break our isola-tion, crack our shells? And I am not only thinking of painted pictures, but of written words, thoughts, voices, eyes, memories of eyes, all these points of warmth... all these movements that carry us a bit further along the road towards another life. Towards an awareness and a world that each moment expands and recovers all that has been lost: the dizziness of being unborn, of being a butterfly or a stone.Jan Håfström (1972)

YOU ASK me if my pictures are modelled on anything, if there is a “theme”. Perhaps. In a way, a lot stems from my experience and exploration

of a landscape, the part of Upland in which I have my studio and house, a country-side rich in historical relics, foundations of buildings, and storage cellars. All these long since forgotten and overgrown places are sharply delineated in the surrounding terrain, their simple, magical shapes seem to dominate the landscape. The crack in an animal cranium that I found reminded me of a dark watercourse, and the shape of a pile of earth or a ditch became an image

of the entire landscape, a model. – What I am looking for out there is an image. A form. A new feeling. And I believe that this always comes about in a meeting, something that has been prepared for a long time, I don’t quite know what, but I look for it everywhere. Waiting for a signal.

When this signal finally comes and the entire process has been started, the lands-cape vanishes, with everything that has been my security while waiting. But the image is there. And its strangeness, its lack of nature, fills me with pain and astonish-ment.Jan Håfström (1975)

BEFORE YOU enter this landscape, I must issue a warning: the materiality of the world you will encounter is impregnable, and your presence is

acceptable only on one condition, namely that you possess a proper sense of oblivion. I urge you to see everything, and forget everything. Nothing else is important.

The paths that lead to the openings of this landscape – the graves, the subterra-nean rooms, and the springs – are the paths of my life, and each step is a step closer to my disappearance. Oblivion and me-mory are not separate categories, they are

counter-motions forming a magnetic field – the state of equilibrium that prevails on this and the other side of what we call language. Is this the resource that Robert Smithson has in mind when he calls poetry a “dying language”? A domain for creative force. A zero point.

One thing is certain: at this limit, sub-jectivity ceases. The Book of Tao says: “The softest under the heaven overcomes the hardest. The formless permeates the solid.”

The journey is over. The journey begins.Jan Håfström (1980)

IT MAY sound paradoxical, but I expe-rience museums as tremendously modern environments. What this may mean will depend naturally on the

sense in which I happen to use the word “modern”. Above all I think it’s a question of an emptiness that surrounds the objects, an independence they have acquired, be-ing as it were aside from the world. I walk through these desolate halls, and see stand after stand filled with dust and lumber. Bits of bone, fragments of weapons, each the centre of an inaccessible order. The dry commentaries of the yellowing labels serve only to emphasise still further the absurdness of trying to say anything about this item or that. It is not, by any means, a question of giving up in the face of

something incomprehensible – on the contrary, there is an intimacy here, a mood, in which I really see the other thing here beside me, alone, and liberated from the hierarchical, authoritarian system. And yet the museum itself constitutes a tremen-dously clear image of that system, with its pathological, hyperpedantic efforts to order everything in its place. The near, the far, the Christian, the bestial, race, culture and Heidelberg. But I feel how the muse-ums are losing their neuroses, their built-in terror of the unknown on the other side of the Jura, and all these guarantees, these projections of security, can be dispensed with. There is an ocean on all sides. I must repeat that: there is an ocean on all sides.Jan Håfström (1968)

The family home of Håfström’s

Dad, 1945 Erik Håfström and Isabella

Child drawing, 1948

Jan Håfström, Humlegården, 1939

Helga (my mother), Ejnar, Wendela, Svea and Astrid, 1912 Dagens Nyheter, 1977

With Rutger Hauer in Budapest august 2010

24 25

THE DISTURBING and liberating thing about a painting is not that it shows us a way to paint but that it shows us a way of living. This is so-

mething we can perhaps say, but what can it mean? It can mean that the picture we see becomes the entrance to an experience which escapes all regulation, all rational control, an experience of totality in which the boundary between myself and the world is unclear, impossible to draw. It’s remarkable, you can stand for a long time looking at a picture, everything looks calm on the surface: and yet there is a whole life at stake here. Because one of us has sen-sed what he is part of, what he bears within himself: the seconds, the millions of years.

At its deepest level I think this is an ex-perience of kinship, of not being alone, not being alien. Is that not the magnificent thing, not being alone? Is it not that which makes pictures meaningful and necessary, that they encourage us to break our isola-tion, crack our shells? And I am not only thinking of painted pictures, but of written words, thoughts, voices, eyes, memories of eyes, all these points of warmth... all these movements that carry us a bit further along the road towards another life. Towards an awareness and a world that each moment expands and recovers all that has been lost: the dizziness of being unborn, of being a butterfly or a stone.Jan Håfström (1972)

YOU ASK me if my pictures are modelled on anything, if there is a “theme”. Perhaps. In a way, a lot stems from my experience and exploration

of a landscape, the part of Upland in which I have my studio and house, a country-side rich in historical relics, foundations of buildings, and storage cellars. All these long since forgotten and overgrown places are sharply delineated in the surrounding terrain, their simple, magical shapes seem to dominate the landscape. The crack in an animal cranium that I found reminded me of a dark watercourse, and the shape of a pile of earth or a ditch became an image

of the entire landscape, a model. – What I am looking for out there is an image. A form. A new feeling. And I believe that this always comes about in a meeting, something that has been prepared for a long time, I don’t quite know what, but I look for it everywhere. Waiting for a signal.

When this signal finally comes and the entire process has been started, the lands-cape vanishes, with everything that has been my security while waiting. But the image is there. And its strangeness, its lack of nature, fills me with pain and astonish-ment.Jan Håfström (1975)

BEFORE YOU enter this landscape, I must issue a warning: the materiality of the world you will encounter is impregnable, and your presence is

acceptable only on one condition, namely that you possess a proper sense of oblivion. I urge you to see everything, and forget everything. Nothing else is important.

The paths that lead to the openings of this landscape – the graves, the subterra-nean rooms, and the springs – are the paths of my life, and each step is a step closer to my disappearance. Oblivion and me-mory are not separate categories, they are

counter-motions forming a magnetic field – the state of equilibrium that prevails on this and the other side of what we call language. Is this the resource that Robert Smithson has in mind when he calls poetry a “dying language”? A domain for creative force. A zero point.

One thing is certain: at this limit, sub-jectivity ceases. The Book of Tao says: “The softest under the heaven overcomes the hardest. The formless permeates the solid.”

The journey is over. The journey begins.Jan Håfström (1980)

IT MAY sound paradoxical, but I expe-rience museums as tremendously modern environments. What this may mean will depend naturally on the

sense in which I happen to use the word “modern”. Above all I think it’s a question of an emptiness that surrounds the objects, an independence they have acquired, be-ing as it were aside from the world. I walk through these desolate halls, and see stand after stand filled with dust and lumber. Bits of bone, fragments of weapons, each the centre of an inaccessible order. The dry commentaries of the yellowing labels serve only to emphasise still further the absurdness of trying to say anything about this item or that. It is not, by any means, a question of giving up in the face of

something incomprehensible – on the contrary, there is an intimacy here, a mood, in which I really see the other thing here beside me, alone, and liberated from the hierarchical, authoritarian system. And yet the museum itself constitutes a tremen-dously clear image of that system, with its pathological, hyperpedantic efforts to order everything in its place. The near, the far, the Christian, the bestial, race, culture and Heidelberg. But I feel how the muse-ums are losing their neuroses, their built-in terror of the unknown on the other side of the Jura, and all these guarantees, these projections of security, can be dispensed with. There is an ocean on all sides. I must repeat that: there is an ocean on all sides.Jan Håfström (1968)

The family home of Håfström’s

Dad, 1945 Erik Håfström and Isabella

Child drawing, 1948

Jan Håfström, Humlegården, 1939

Helga (my mother), Ejnar, Wendela, Svea and Astrid, 1912 Dagens Nyheter, 1977

With Rutger Hauer in Budapest august 2010

24 25

26 27

21 Incident’s of Grandma’s travel in America, 2009Eldridge Optician Gallery, New York, 2010

26 27

21 Incident’s of Grandma’s travel in America, 2009Eldridge Optician Gallery, New York, 2010

28 29

Jan Håfström’s grandmother, Gerda Birgitta 1896, before leaving for New York City, where she saw Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show.

21 Incident’s of Grandma’s travel in America, 2009

Wild Bill Hickock, Texas Jack, William Cody (Buffalo Bill).

28 29

Jan Håfström’s grandmother, Gerda Birgitta 1896, before leaving for New York City, where she saw Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show.

21 Incident’s of Grandma’s travel in America, 2009

Wild Bill Hickock, Texas Jack, William Cody (Buffalo Bill).

30 31

Nature as writing by Douglas Feuk

MUCH OF Håfström’s painting around 1970 is concerned with a distance between ”language” and “world”. It is an opposition which could easily end up in a

sentimental dualism (not least after 1968 when polarisation and absolute dividing lines became more and more part of the spirit of the age). That there was a pro-blem here, or at any rate something which threatened to develop into a problem, became clearer and clearer to Håfström, I think – and this contributed to the re-orientation that kept him busy in the early 70s. At the same time it is worth remem-bering that his way of treating the conflict beteween culture and nature from the very beginning involved an attempt to recon-cile these entities: to describe the cracks and the barriers – but also the premonition of concord, a possible accord between the world and man.

Michel Butor says something very apt about this (in a text on Jules Verne): “For him there is no insurmountable difference between the creations of man and the phe-nomena of nature. The transition from the factual to the imaginary is not noticeable since nature itself dreams and since man in the end stages these dreams, perhaps on a smaller scale, with less grandeur but still with more perfection: he brings them to completion and gives them true finish. He carries out the promises that are written in the interior of things”.

This is the kind of attitude I seem to find in Jan Håfström’s painting too. That he gave up the representational mode in the mid-70 is, I think, to do with such a basic approach. It is an attempt to paint picture and motif closer to one another, to make sign and matter coincide. And one can see how his paintings and the landscape begin to approach each other in some of the first works to absorb him after moving to the countryside, to a house some miles north of Stockholm. The motifs here come from the muddy fields surrounding the house, but his move meant not only approaching elementary things like earth, water, horizons, the weather... In his pictures (as well as in other contexts) Håfström also speaks of nature as a text, a musical score, a cipher; a set of signs “pointing towards something else”.

These paintings are large and calm and meditative and have not let go of all ties with the representational. Still the illusion makes a rather “conceptual” impression – in a painting like Ploughed Field for ex-ample. A close-up of a dark earthly surface which here and there is cracked in streaks of even more subterranean blackness, and with the whole ground traversed by a light quiver as of a breath, a saturated puff from the interior of the earth. The canvas un-deniably gives a condensed experience

of mouldering matter. Still, this painting is not what one would like to call stable and “down to earth” – no more than, for instance, Dubuffet’s studies of the ground, some of his “texturologies”. (A word that, by the way, seems rather suitable in this context, with its double meaning of something which is both tactile and a sign). Håfström’s earth painting is of course heaviser, more Nordic, decidedly more romantic than Dubuffet’s paintings – what I mean is only that his emphasis on the elementary is a little ambiguous after all, since it is drawn into a kind of double movement towards something both more abstract and more concrete than mere representation. Call it an archetype, a sort of primary structure – something which in any case seems to dream of a more dis-tant landscape than that which the motif alludes to.

The work of the early 70s often felt like attempts at approaching such a mythical “origin”. Paintings of earth and stones, of water, ditches, sub- terranean streams. Time and again the same elementary matter – as a kind of conjura-tion; as a desire to sink into another time than one’s own personal or historical time. The motifs were sometimes enlarged in a visionary way roughly similar to those in Walt Whitman’s work, when he praises his union with cosmos. The earth paintings also have this character of celebration: “I find I incorporate gneiss and coal and longthreaded moss...”

But approaching nature by means of a representational mode would soon stand out not only as a detour but as an impasse. The landscape had to be accorded a more immediate and more composite presence in the picture – but how was this to be achieved? What would such a picture look like? Jan Håfström has described how during the work on his earth paintings he came to experience the surface of the canvas more and more as independent

sensuous matter, a separate part of natu-re. During the next few years there also emerged a way of handling the materials, paint, paper, canvas and paint-rags, which felt more immediately physical than before. At times the act of painting assumed the character of an intuitive, slightly somnanbulistic process of “nature”. It was as if the work less than ever was about personal creation but rather an in-vestigation, or even better an invocation – an attempt to awaken those images that are slumbering in the material itself (like those dreams of nature that Butor spoke of).

Utopian Matter

The fact thar Håfsröm’s art eventually is no longer representational doesn’t mean that the paintings want us to forget the earth or the world of the senses. On the contrary – here there is no striving whatso- ever for “pure form” or anything “Abso- lutely Spiritual” (or whatever term the purist tradition usually employs). Things may, however, look as in Mud Painting (from 1978) which, in spite of its em- phasis on surface, more than anything gives a sensation of something physical, of a substance, of matter. The acrylic paint is laid on loosely in many thin layers, with the dark groundlayer as a shadow un-derneath. The grey-white-blue surface is divided by a number of thin horizontal lines, repeated at regular intervals.

Not much of a “motif” one might think, but quite enough to give life to an elementary drama, something which takes place in the meeting between a static form and this other fluid smooth matter which spreads out in between and which here and there almost covers the linear construction (as if it were about to disappear, sink into a greater whole).This is not so unlike some of Håfström’s early paintings, where it also sometimes could

look as if the drawing were about to be dissolved and the motif transformed. A painting like The Hand, for example, is representational in some sense, but with a surface full of gliding, contradictory movements.

In this painting from 1966 an enormous imprint of a hand seems to emerge from the canvas (or perhaps disintegrate). The dripped surface gives a picture of forget-fulness and disintegration, information in the process of being lost – but also of something vital, something unfinished, under way. Here it really appears as if the painting was part of a process of nature. The spotted surface pattern resembles structures that can be discerned in micro- scopes or telescopes. The immeasureably vast and the absolutely minute worlds join and merge into each other and into the hand (the talisman, the abstract sign). What is the subject of a painting like that? Isn’t it, among other things, the meeting between something figurative and some- thing which is unlimited, without form? Actually this is a fundamental structure in practically all of Jan Håfström’s work. In various ways they have tried to depict the encounter between a form (a social convention, a linguistic order, a Logos) and this Other which is beyond humanity – what he called “an ocean on every side”.

The experience is about a distance. But at the same time the paintings seemed to promise the possibility of crossing that border. A painting like The Hand could give the viewer the immediate feeling that both he and the world were expanding. One could literally see how the distance disappeared, how the difference between the human and the beyond-the-human lost its meaning. It felt like an invitation to a greater communion, an existential in- vocation that approached Whitman’s ecstasy, his feeling of belonging unto blending with everything that exists,

Landscape Monument, 1970

Earth cellar

The Tropics, 1968. Private collectionAugust Strindberg, A Blue Book, 1907

30 31

Nature as writing by Douglas Feuk

MUCH OF Håfström’s painting around 1970 is concerned with a distance between ”language” and “world”. It is an opposition which could easily end up in a

sentimental dualism (not least after 1968 when polarisation and absolute dividing lines became more and more part of the spirit of the age). That there was a pro-blem here, or at any rate something which threatened to develop into a problem, became clearer and clearer to Håfström, I think – and this contributed to the re-orientation that kept him busy in the early 70s. At the same time it is worth remem-bering that his way of treating the conflict beteween culture and nature from the very beginning involved an attempt to recon-cile these entities: to describe the cracks and the barriers – but also the premonition of concord, a possible accord between the world and man.

Michel Butor says something very apt about this (in a text on Jules Verne): “For him there is no insurmountable difference between the creations of man and the phe-nomena of nature. The transition from the factual to the imaginary is not noticeable since nature itself dreams and since man in the end stages these dreams, perhaps on a smaller scale, with less grandeur but still with more perfection: he brings them to completion and gives them true finish. He carries out the promises that are written in the interior of things”.

This is the kind of attitude I seem to find in Jan Håfström’s painting too. That he gave up the representational mode in the mid-70 is, I think, to do with such a basic approach. It is an attempt to paint picture and motif closer to one another, to make sign and matter coincide. And one can see how his paintings and the landscape begin to approach each other in some of the first works to absorb him after moving to the countryside, to a house some miles north of Stockholm. The motifs here come from the muddy fields surrounding the house, but his move meant not only approaching elementary things like earth, water, horizons, the weather... In his pictures (as well as in other contexts) Håfström also speaks of nature as a text, a musical score, a cipher; a set of signs “pointing towards something else”.

These paintings are large and calm and meditative and have not let go of all ties with the representational. Still the illusion makes a rather “conceptual” impression – in a painting like Ploughed Field for ex-ample. A close-up of a dark earthly surface which here and there is cracked in streaks of even more subterranean blackness, and with the whole ground traversed by a light quiver as of a breath, a saturated puff from the interior of the earth. The canvas un-deniably gives a condensed experience

of mouldering matter. Still, this painting is not what one would like to call stable and “down to earth” – no more than, for instance, Dubuffet’s studies of the ground, some of his “texturologies”. (A word that, by the way, seems rather suitable in this context, with its double meaning of something which is both tactile and a sign). Håfström’s earth painting is of course heaviser, more Nordic, decidedly more romantic than Dubuffet’s paintings – what I mean is only that his emphasis on the elementary is a little ambiguous after all, since it is drawn into a kind of double movement towards something both more abstract and more concrete than mere representation. Call it an archetype, a sort of primary structure – something which in any case seems to dream of a more dis-tant landscape than that which the motif alludes to.

The work of the early 70s often felt like attempts at approaching such a mythical “origin”. Paintings of earth and stones, of water, ditches, sub- terranean streams. Time and again the same elementary matter – as a kind of conjura-tion; as a desire to sink into another time than one’s own personal or historical time. The motifs were sometimes enlarged in a visionary way roughly similar to those in Walt Whitman’s work, when he praises his union with cosmos. The earth paintings also have this character of celebration: “I find I incorporate gneiss and coal and longthreaded moss...”

But approaching nature by means of a representational mode would soon stand out not only as a detour but as an impasse. The landscape had to be accorded a more immediate and more composite presence in the picture – but how was this to be achieved? What would such a picture look like? Jan Håfström has described how during the work on his earth paintings he came to experience the surface of the canvas more and more as independent

sensuous matter, a separate part of natu-re. During the next few years there also emerged a way of handling the materials, paint, paper, canvas and paint-rags, which felt more immediately physical than before. At times the act of painting assumed the character of an intuitive, slightly somnanbulistic process of “nature”. It was as if the work less than ever was about personal creation but rather an in-vestigation, or even better an invocation – an attempt to awaken those images that are slumbering in the material itself (like those dreams of nature that Butor spoke of).

Utopian Matter

The fact thar Håfsröm’s art eventually is no longer representational doesn’t mean that the paintings want us to forget the earth or the world of the senses. On the contrary – here there is no striving whatso- ever for “pure form” or anything “Abso- lutely Spiritual” (or whatever term the purist tradition usually employs). Things may, however, look as in Mud Painting (from 1978) which, in spite of its em- phasis on surface, more than anything gives a sensation of something physical, of a substance, of matter. The acrylic paint is laid on loosely in many thin layers, with the dark groundlayer as a shadow un-derneath. The grey-white-blue surface is divided by a number of thin horizontal lines, repeated at regular intervals.

Not much of a “motif” one might think, but quite enough to give life to an elementary drama, something which takes place in the meeting between a static form and this other fluid smooth matter which spreads out in between and which here and there almost covers the linear construction (as if it were about to disappear, sink into a greater whole).This is not so unlike some of Håfström’s early paintings, where it also sometimes could

look as if the drawing were about to be dissolved and the motif transformed. A painting like The Hand, for example, is representational in some sense, but with a surface full of gliding, contradictory movements.

In this painting from 1966 an enormous imprint of a hand seems to emerge from the canvas (or perhaps disintegrate). The dripped surface gives a picture of forget-fulness and disintegration, information in the process of being lost – but also of something vital, something unfinished, under way. Here it really appears as if the painting was part of a process of nature. The spotted surface pattern resembles structures that can be discerned in micro- scopes or telescopes. The immeasureably vast and the absolutely minute worlds join and merge into each other and into the hand (the talisman, the abstract sign). What is the subject of a painting like that? Isn’t it, among other things, the meeting between something figurative and some- thing which is unlimited, without form? Actually this is a fundamental structure in practically all of Jan Håfström’s work. In various ways they have tried to depict the encounter between a form (a social convention, a linguistic order, a Logos) and this Other which is beyond humanity – what he called “an ocean on every side”.

The experience is about a distance. But at the same time the paintings seemed to promise the possibility of crossing that border. A painting like The Hand could give the viewer the immediate feeling that both he and the world were expanding. One could literally see how the distance disappeared, how the difference between the human and the beyond-the-human lost its meaning. It felt like an invitation to a greater communion, an existential in- vocation that approached Whitman’s ecstasy, his feeling of belonging unto blending with everything that exists,

Landscape Monument, 1970

Earth cellar

The Tropics, 1968. Private collectionAugust Strindberg, A Blue Book, 1907

32 33

everything that has ever existed, and always will:

“My ties and ballasts leave me... I travel... I sail... my elbows rests in the sea-gapsI skirt the sierras... my palms cover continents”

The driving force in Håfström’s work has been, I think, very much a dream of such a mystical, “impossible” experience of totality – both a view of the world from above and a complete merging between the world and one’s own body. The pain-tings from the late 70s are a long series of such mergings with an idealized great-ness. A picture like Mud Painting, com-paratively modest in size, still contains something generously magnificent and visioneary in its construction. At the same time, however, you find a clearly anti- pathetic element in his tone, a certain character of grammatical example. This has always been the two sides of a specific- ally Håfströmesque art of invocation, a sort of critical-utopian stand where the “impersonal” and distancing are the side that usually is stressed – even by him. One of his big exhibitions he called “History and Geology – Investigation of a Landscape”, and this certainly is a title that fully covers the structuralist ambi-tions of the paintings. Buton the other hand the name perhaps only covered one side of his paintings.

In time the often repeated talk about the theoretical and philosophical beliefs of Jan Håfström can become tiresome. What are these remarkable tenets dealt with in his paintings? Do they even aim at a discussion with the viewer? They appeal primarily to a completely different side of our minds; they are simply much crazier, contain much more magic thinking than any kind of intellectual profundity. One

can actually feel inclined to stress a radi-cally different side of this art. Is it not a magnificently childlike fantasy that meets us in Mud Painting? This soft, lukewarm, almost dormant substance; this both in-timate and far-reaching form – I have to admit that the painting awakens, in me anyway, dim, infantile memories. As if it tried to recall a long since repressed childish sensuality – yes, as if the pain-ting partly was this refound lost context, this “Paradise Lost” which is the title of another painting, or which is referred to in this beautiful line by Novalis, “Originally everything was body. ONE BODY.” Or even more dazedly, even more exaltedly in Norman O. Brown’s work, for instance in the following invocation, wonderfully saturated with meaning: “Mother is mold, modder, matter; Mutter is mud.”

What childishness! Or, for that matter, what age-old fantasy, this babb-ling doggerel about Mother being Mud and Mold, she whom we all at one time have been inside of, and whom we soon, very soon, dissolved and floating, will re-turn to. Knowledge of this disappearance is also particularly present in Håfström’s painting of the 70s. One of the first “abstract” paintings, is a huge, five meter long picture which still seems to bear in mind the dark, tilled land. The difference is, perhaps, that in this painting one feels as if one is under the earth. It is as if what one saw was traces of a landscape in the process of settling, being embedded in geological memory. Through the earth-coloured darkness, a number of parallel lines stretch – like erosions in the e arth, like subsiding underground horizons.

The Terrain of Oblivion In Håfström’s work there has always been a materiality (in the colours, in the surface structure itself) which has always been

an antipole to the figurative (and, for that matter, to the intellectual atmosphere of his pictures). And his painting is, after all, pervaded by a commitment which is as contradictory in the late 70s as it had been a decade earlier. The landscape he paints is not done after nature, yet it is there – as a metaphorical quality in the paint, in the tactile surface (and it is precisely here that his paintings deviate from a mini-malist aesthetics). On the other hand, his relation to nature is very much an indirect one, full of additional strata of culture and history – and this double optics has dominated his paintings from the very beginning. A motif such as The Forest is placed on the evasive borderline bet-ween language and nature. It is an attitude characteristic of the 60s, if you like – but this dependence on the 60s is felt even in his later work. One can see it clearly in some 1980 paintings entitled The Terrain of Oblivion – three large canvases charged with meaning and with a centre in which many previous themes intersect.

The House, for instance, has been an important motif throughout the years. In early paintings it stands out chiefly as an emblem of isolation and aloofness from the world. The painting of his own house from 1971-72, on the other hand, makes an impression of a building rooted in the earth, yet shining palely and distantly (by moonlight) as the memory of a different house, perhaps that of his childhood. With its night mood and autumnal setting, it is a motif as full of homesickness as of transitoriness. And the movement “home- wards” (towards the earth, a mythical origin, a final destination) is even more pronounced in the almost subterranean architecture which finally emerges in his paintings. A form which recurs in many variations during the 70s is for example “the pyramid”: its physical appearance is as abstract as that of the reversed triangle “the ditch” – but it also has something of the same archetypal condensation. The pyramid is of course, among other things, an artificial cave, with labyrinthine passa-ges and, at its center, a mysterious room

(which is a sepulchre but is also remini-scent of the dark cave that used to be our first abode).

“The pyramid” is a form that recurs in The Terrain of Oblivion. In all three paintings, it can be glimpsed as a more or less ruined geometrical arrangement, more or less devoured by something resembling fleshy greenery (or perhaps just some kind of brooding darkness). Glades open up where a dim light emer-ges, suggesting the contours of a building which in some ways is both there and not there, massive, earth-coloured, and at the same time unpalpable like a shadow or a faint echo. In one of the paintings the whole of the lower part exudes a dirty, bone-white colour, like the remains of a house or some other architectonic ruins. Sights of this kind are commonplace in adventure stories, films and cartoons – in the mass culture that the 20th century takes for granted. Doesn’t Tarzan often arrive at a forgotten jungle town, long deserted and derelict, and now overgrown with heavy, tropical vegetation?

Memories of such scenes haunt Håfström’s versions of The Terrain of Oblivion. They are about disappearing, a death fantasy – but they also instil a fee-ling of return, of déjà vu. Where did I see this before? Inte what time has it been sunk, this half subterranean landscape with its darkness and its at once threate-ning and lascivious yearning for destruc-tion? It is a temptation that one recognises from so many earlier paintings, and in its mixture of regressive and morbid fanta-sies it is of course an arch-Romantic mo-tif. An integral element here is the basic contradiction that was detectable in the paintings from the 60s and 70s and which can be described in terms such as “langu-age” and “world”, “culture” and “nature”. What has happened is perhaps only that the opposites more than ever are in the process of growing together. And once more one is reminded of Michel Butor’s words: “To him there is no insurmoun-table difference between the creations of man and the phenomena of nature...”

Douglas Feuk

Extracts from the book Sein Leben malen – Painting One’s Life,Kleinheinrich Verlag, Münster, 1989.

English translation: Lars-Håkan Svensson and Muriel Larsson

Untitled, 1974

The Ditch, 1976. Private collection

Strata, 1983. Private collection

32 33

everything that has ever existed, and always will:

“My ties and ballasts leave me... I travel... I sail... my elbows rests in the sea-gapsI skirt the sierras... my palms cover continents”

The driving force in Håfström’s work has been, I think, very much a dream of such a mystical, “impossible” experience of totality – both a view of the world from above and a complete merging between the world and one’s own body. The pain-tings from the late 70s are a long series of such mergings with an idealized great-ness. A picture like Mud Painting, com-paratively modest in size, still contains something generously magnificent and visioneary in its construction. At the same time, however, you find a clearly anti- pathetic element in his tone, a certain character of grammatical example. This has always been the two sides of a specific- ally Håfströmesque art of invocation, a sort of critical-utopian stand where the “impersonal” and distancing are the side that usually is stressed – even by him. One of his big exhibitions he called “History and Geology – Investigation of a Landscape”, and this certainly is a title that fully covers the structuralist ambi-tions of the paintings. Buton the other hand the name perhaps only covered one side of his paintings.

In time the often repeated talk about the theoretical and philosophical beliefs of Jan Håfström can become tiresome. What are these remarkable tenets dealt with in his paintings? Do they even aim at a discussion with the viewer? They appeal primarily to a completely different side of our minds; they are simply much crazier, contain much more magic thinking than any kind of intellectual profundity. One

can actually feel inclined to stress a radi-cally different side of this art. Is it not a magnificently childlike fantasy that meets us in Mud Painting? This soft, lukewarm, almost dormant substance; this both in-timate and far-reaching form – I have to admit that the painting awakens, in me anyway, dim, infantile memories. As if it tried to recall a long since repressed childish sensuality – yes, as if the pain-ting partly was this refound lost context, this “Paradise Lost” which is the title of another painting, or which is referred to in this beautiful line by Novalis, “Originally everything was body. ONE BODY.” Or even more dazedly, even more exaltedly in Norman O. Brown’s work, for instance in the following invocation, wonderfully saturated with meaning: “Mother is mold, modder, matter; Mutter is mud.”

What childishness! Or, for that matter, what age-old fantasy, this babb-ling doggerel about Mother being Mud and Mold, she whom we all at one time have been inside of, and whom we soon, very soon, dissolved and floating, will re-turn to. Knowledge of this disappearance is also particularly present in Håfström’s painting of the 70s. One of the first “abstract” paintings, is a huge, five meter long picture which still seems to bear in mind the dark, tilled land. The difference is, perhaps, that in this painting one feels as if one is under the earth. It is as if what one saw was traces of a landscape in the process of settling, being embedded in geological memory. Through the earth-coloured darkness, a number of parallel lines stretch – like erosions in the e arth, like subsiding underground horizons.

The Terrain of Oblivion In Håfström’s work there has always been a materiality (in the colours, in the surface structure itself) which has always been

an antipole to the figurative (and, for that matter, to the intellectual atmosphere of his pictures). And his painting is, after all, pervaded by a commitment which is as contradictory in the late 70s as it had been a decade earlier. The landscape he paints is not done after nature, yet it is there – as a metaphorical quality in the paint, in the tactile surface (and it is precisely here that his paintings deviate from a mini-malist aesthetics). On the other hand, his relation to nature is very much an indirect one, full of additional strata of culture and history – and this double optics has dominated his paintings from the very beginning. A motif such as The Forest is placed on the evasive borderline bet-ween language and nature. It is an attitude characteristic of the 60s, if you like – but this dependence on the 60s is felt even in his later work. One can see it clearly in some 1980 paintings entitled The Terrain of Oblivion – three large canvases charged with meaning and with a centre in which many previous themes intersect.

The House, for instance, has been an important motif throughout the years. In early paintings it stands out chiefly as an emblem of isolation and aloofness from the world. The painting of his own house from 1971-72, on the other hand, makes an impression of a building rooted in the earth, yet shining palely and distantly (by moonlight) as the memory of a different house, perhaps that of his childhood. With its night mood and autumnal setting, it is a motif as full of homesickness as of transitoriness. And the movement “home- wards” (towards the earth, a mythical origin, a final destination) is even more pronounced in the almost subterranean architecture which finally emerges in his paintings. A form which recurs in many variations during the 70s is for example “the pyramid”: its physical appearance is as abstract as that of the reversed triangle “the ditch” – but it also has something of the same archetypal condensation. The pyramid is of course, among other things, an artificial cave, with labyrinthine passa-ges and, at its center, a mysterious room

(which is a sepulchre but is also remini-scent of the dark cave that used to be our first abode).

“The pyramid” is a form that recurs in The Terrain of Oblivion. In all three paintings, it can be glimpsed as a more or less ruined geometrical arrangement, more or less devoured by something resembling fleshy greenery (or perhaps just some kind of brooding darkness). Glades open up where a dim light emer-ges, suggesting the contours of a building which in some ways is both there and not there, massive, earth-coloured, and at the same time unpalpable like a shadow or a faint echo. In one of the paintings the whole of the lower part exudes a dirty, bone-white colour, like the remains of a house or some other architectonic ruins. Sights of this kind are commonplace in adventure stories, films and cartoons – in the mass culture that the 20th century takes for granted. Doesn’t Tarzan often arrive at a forgotten jungle town, long deserted and derelict, and now overgrown with heavy, tropical vegetation?

Memories of such scenes haunt Håfström’s versions of The Terrain of Oblivion. They are about disappearing, a death fantasy – but they also instil a fee-ling of return, of déjà vu. Where did I see this before? Inte what time has it been sunk, this half subterranean landscape with its darkness and its at once threate-ning and lascivious yearning for destruc-tion? It is a temptation that one recognises from so many earlier paintings, and in its mixture of regressive and morbid fanta-sies it is of course an arch-Romantic mo-tif. An integral element here is the basic contradiction that was detectable in the paintings from the 60s and 70s and which can be described in terms such as “langu-age” and “world”, “culture” and “nature”. What has happened is perhaps only that the opposites more than ever are in the process of growing together. And once more one is reminded of Michel Butor’s words: “To him there is no insurmoun-table difference between the creations of man and the phenomena of nature...”

Douglas Feuk

Extracts from the book Sein Leben malen – Painting One’s Life,Kleinheinrich Verlag, Münster, 1989.

English translation: Lars-Håkan Svensson and Muriel Larsson

Untitled, 1974

The Ditch, 1976. Private collection

Strata, 1983. Private collection

34 35

The House, 1968. Collection Albert Bonnier Förlag

Hand. Air, 1972. Norrköpings konstmuseum, Sweden

Nature Morte, 1971. The Government Offices of Sweden

Ditch, 1972. Private collection

Dreaming about the Earth, 1967. Private collection

34 35

The House, 1968. Collection Albert Bonnier Förlag

Hand. Air, 1972. Norrköpings konstmuseum, Sweden

Nature Morte, 1971. The Government Offices of Sweden

Ditch, 1972. Private collection

Dreaming about the Earth, 1967. Private collection

36 37

The Disappearing Diana Palmer, 2010

36 37

The Disappearing Diana Palmer, 2010

38 39

38 39

40 41

The Murderer, 2010 Auschwitz, 2006

40 41

The Murderer, 2010 Auschwitz, 2006

42 43

The Message of the Family

IT WAS A night in the beginning of the 1970s. I was driving from Märsta to Vallentuna. The night is light, it is early summer. I pass the church of Långhundra and catch a glimpse of a moose. I turn on the car radio, it’s a programme about Ronald Laing, a central figure in the new British

psychiatry. Two of his books have gained a lot of attention: The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience. Laing has worked with people who have made “psychotic journeys”. An experience that dissolves the borders of the self and initiates an infernal vertigo. The consciousness rushes back-wards through creation, passes stages where it was millions of years ago. I turn into a small gravelled road that goes through a desolate clear-cut area. Suddenly I’m unsure about the route. The radio presenter changes the focus and starts to talk about “the message of the family”. At the same moment I recognise a church tower far away. The growing unease I’ve felt since I left the main road is now gone. I pull the brakes and park the car next to a gravel pit. The message of the family. I speak the words to myself and hear the blood buzzing in my ears. It is as if the entire landscape around me and the car – the fog that rises from the wetlands, the house foundations under the trees, the earth cellars with their indescribable content – it is as if this entire world could fit into those words. The message of the family. As

if I suddenly had received an inkling of a larger context where I belonged. As if the loneliness and fear that had always tormented me was over. Could it be true? I sit in the car and cry. The beams from the headlights plough a road in the fir forest and hit an uprooted tree. The silhouette looks like a head with wildly flapping hair. It is a sight that both comforts and scares me. Who am I? Who is the other? Have I entered into an alliance with the dark powers? Has this night placed me outside of time?

I don’t know but perhaps art became less important to me after this. At least its significance shifted: from something exterior to something interior; from something general to something singular. Something deeply personal. I realised that my loneliness in the world was something that would follow me – but in a different form. My life had roots that I had never imagined. Was it my mission to find them? Was my family somewhere out there in the dark? An army of shadows that talked through me. That used my voice?

I have never got to the bottom of it. What happened in the car that night remains a mystery. The key is buried somewhere between Märsta and Vallentuna.

Jan Håfström, October 2010.

Grandmother, 1972. Moderna Museet, Stockholm

PRODUCED BY: WORD & OBJECT PUBL. JAN HÅFSTRÖM. FRUIT & FLOWER DELI. ANDREAS BRÄNDSTRÖM FINE ARTS. Design and production by Leo Form AB www.leoform.se. Printing by V-TAB, Oct 2010. © 2010 Jan Håfström. © 2010 Texts: The Authours. © 2010 Photographs: The photographers.

Photographers: Sid 2: Patric Leo, ”Walker’s escape”, 2010. Sid 3: Douglas Feuk, ”Working on The Forest”, 1968. Sid 5: Patric Leo. Sid 6–7: Johann Bergenholz. Sid 8: Mathias Johansson. Sid 9: Lotta Melin, ”Dancers in the sunset”. Sid 10–11: Mathias Johansson. Sid 12–13: Patric Leo. Sid 14–17: Patric Leo. Sid 19:

Johanna Bergenholz. Sid 19–21: Johann Bergenholz. Sid 23: Lars Gustafsson, ”Diana Palmer”. Sid 26–27: Rodrigo Mallea Lira. Sid 30: Patric Leo. Sid 31: Sven Åsberg, ”Earth cellar”. Sid 32: Patric Leo. Sid 33: Patric Leo, ”Strata”. Eric Cornelius, Untitled Sid 36–37: Patric Leo. Sid 38–39: Johann Bergenholz.

Sid 40–41: Patric Leo. Sid 44: Mathias Johansson. ISBN 978-91-633-7739-6. www.fruitandflowerdeli.com www.janhafstrom.com

42 43

The Message of the Family

IT WAS A night in the beginning of the 1970s. I was driving from Märsta to Vallentuna. The night is light, it is early summer. I pass the church of Långhundra and catch a glimpse of a moose. I turn on the car radio, it’s a programme about Ronald Laing, a central figure in the new British

psychiatry. Two of his books have gained a lot of attention: The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience. Laing has worked with people who have made “psychotic journeys”. An experience that dissolves the borders of the self and initiates an infernal vertigo. The consciousness rushes back-wards through creation, passes stages where it was millions of years ago. I turn into a small gravelled road that goes through a desolate clear-cut area. Suddenly I’m unsure about the route. The radio presenter changes the focus and starts to talk about “the message of the family”. At the same moment I recognise a church tower far away. The growing unease I’ve felt since I left the main road is now gone. I pull the brakes and park the car next to a gravel pit. The message of the family. I speak the words to myself and hear the blood buzzing in my ears. It is as if the entire landscape around me and the car – the fog that rises from the wetlands, the house foundations under the trees, the earth cellars with their indescribable content – it is as if this entire world could fit into those words. The message of the family. As

if I suddenly had received an inkling of a larger context where I belonged. As if the loneliness and fear that had always tormented me was over. Could it be true? I sit in the car and cry. The beams from the headlights plough a road in the fir forest and hit an uprooted tree. The silhouette looks like a head with wildly flapping hair. It is a sight that both comforts and scares me. Who am I? Who is the other? Have I entered into an alliance with the dark powers? Has this night placed me outside of time?

I don’t know but perhaps art became less important to me after this. At least its significance shifted: from something exterior to something interior; from something general to something singular. Something deeply personal. I realised that my loneliness in the world was something that would follow me – but in a different form. My life had roots that I had never imagined. Was it my mission to find them? Was my family somewhere out there in the dark? An army of shadows that talked through me. That used my voice?

I have never got to the bottom of it. What happened in the car that night remains a mystery. The key is buried somewhere between Märsta and Vallentuna.

Jan Håfström, October 2010.

Grandmother, 1972. Moderna Museet, Stockholm

PRODUCED BY: WORD & OBJECT PUBL. JAN HÅFSTRÖM. FRUIT & FLOWER DELI. ANDREAS BRÄNDSTRÖM FINE ARTS. Design and production by Leo Form AB www.leoform.se. Printing by V-TAB, Oct 2010. © 2010 Jan Håfström. © 2010 Texts: The Authours. © 2010 Photographs: The photographers.

Photographers: Sid 2: Patric Leo, ”Walker’s escape”, 2010. Sid 3: Douglas Feuk, ”Working on The Forest”, 1968. Sid 5: Patric Leo. Sid 6–7: Johann Bergenholz. Sid 8: Mathias Johansson. Sid 9: Lotta Melin, ”Dancers in the sunset”. Sid 10–11: Mathias Johansson. Sid 12–13: Patric Leo. Sid 14–17: Patric Leo. Sid 19:

Johanna Bergenholz. Sid 19–21: Johann Bergenholz. Sid 23: Lars Gustafsson, ”Diana Palmer”. Sid 26–27: Rodrigo Mallea Lira. Sid 30: Patric Leo. Sid 31: Sven Åsberg, ”Earth cellar”. Sid 32: Patric Leo. Sid 33: Patric Leo, ”Strata”. Eric Cornelius, Untitled Sid 36–37: Patric Leo. Sid 38–39: Johann Bergenholz.

Sid 40–41: Patric Leo. Sid 44: Mathias Johansson. ISBN 978-91-633-7739-6. www.fruitandflowerdeli.com www.janhafstrom.com

The Castle , 2001

JAN HÅFSTRÖM Before being accepted as a student at the College of Art in

Stockholm in 1963 Jan Håfström studies Theory of Literature and Philosophy

at Lund University. First visits the United States in 1966 – the year that marks

his debut as a painter. Ten years later has his own studio at P.S. One in New

York. Artist-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin 1986–87. In

1994 Lars Nittve mounts a major retrospective at the Rooseum in Malmö, later

shown in 1995 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Håfström retrospectives

during the 90’s include The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (1994), the

Astrup-Fearnley in Oslo (1995) and the Sarajevo National Gallery (1996) as

well as in Sweden Bildmuseet in Umeå, Kulturmagasinet in Sundsvall and the

Art Museums of Bohuslän and Rydal. In 1998 Jan Håfström participates in

Memento Metropolis in Stockholm with the installation Holiday Inn, Sarajevo.

The exhibition ”The Inner Station” is shown at the University of St. Petersburg

and the ICA in Moscow in 2000. In the 60’s and 70’s Håfström worked with

short films. He has been an art critic for Expressen and Dagens Nyheter and is

the author of a number of essays and texts in catalogues and journals.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS La Biennale di Venezia:1980. Nordic Pavillion1990. Nordic Pavillion2003. Museo Correr, “From Rauschenberg to Murakami”

2009. Arsenale, “Making Worlds”

2010. The Volta show. New York

2010. Freies Museum, Berlin. “Das Verlorene Paradies”

2009. “Heart of Darkness”, Liljevalchs konsthall,

Stockholm, Sweden

2008. “L’ Égypte”, Brandstrom, Stockholm, Sweden

2006. “The Club”. Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art. Polen

2002. “Industry of Night”, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg, Sweden

2002. Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

“Blinky Palermo never went to Belgian Congo”.

2001. “Walker”, Färgfabriken, Stockholm, Sweden