Nicklas Randau: Durations
Galerie Forsblom Stockholm
February 21–March 22
Opening February 20, 5–7pm
Nicklas Randau’s paintings are unique and characteristic. His choice of color and his technique of applying the paint makes a distinguished impression. He uses a spatula or even his bare hands directly on the canvas and thick lumps of oil paint are left to dry. One could define his paintings as monochrome, but the color itself has a language in its nuances and structures, like the fluctuations of the waves of the ocean.
Randau is inspired by different tonalites as well as the ambience in literature, poetry and music. In the exhibition at Galerie Forsblom, Randau has utilized colors such as earthy hues, cadmium red, blue- and yellow ochre, lapis lazuli and zinc-white. The colors are vivid, distinct and accentuated. One of the paintings is entitled Orchestra Pit (Universe). The strokes in the painting resembles bows, sets of strings, maybe notes? Or like the whipping rain on a window. Other titles allude to the color of the painting, while some works are untitled. There is a recognition in the paintings and the colors, connecting to previous experience, either from a fraction every-day life, a text or art history.
During the last year the artist has developed a deeper interest in dreams and the unconscious, which also has had an impact on his work in the studio. In what way do our dreams influence our everyday life? Where do the colors originate from? A doorway to the creative process is to step into the subconscious, the intuitive, a state of mind that is close to the dream. In the condition between dream and reality, at the stage when you fall asleep and then suddenly wake up just to see the details of your surroundings with a new sense of clarity, with sharp and curious eyes.
”Remarking, reverberating at, the least event, alteration - as onto the loaded present, issued from sleep”
Paul Valéry: Collected works of Paul Valéry, volume 2, Poems in the Rough, p.20.
The title of the exhibition Durations is taken from a poem by Paul Valéry, where the definition of the word is explained in its simplicity; as consisting of both space and time. A condition that also appears in painting as such, relating to the room, the spatiality, or even an inner room, as well as the time-consuming creative process and the subjective experience of time. Randau renders an ambience in his works, he transmits the colors and the tinges on the canvas in a continuum of form and movement – a duration.
Nicklas Randau was born in 1989 in Kristianstad and is based in Malmö, Sweden. He graduated from the Malmö Art Academy in 2017 and was awarded the acknowledged Bernadotte Grant, the Ellen Trotzig Fund and the Ax:son Johnsons travel grant. Randau’s work is included in the collection of Malmö Art Museum and he has been exhibited at Werkhalle Wiesenburg, Berlin, Germany, The Royal Academy of Art, Stockholm and Strandverket Konsthall, Marstrand, Sweden. Since 2019 the artist is represented by Galerie Forsblom and this is his second exhibition at the gallery.