Max Delany — Death’s Head Abstraction

Stieg Pers­son — Death’s Head Abstrac­tion

An adher­ence to the prac­tice of paint­ing implies an engage­ment with a spe­cif­ic and com­plex his­to­ry, encom­pass­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al func­tion, for­mal con­ven­tion and mate­ri­al­ist expo­si­tion. Stieg Persson’s paint­ings are pred­i­cat­ed upon such a series of con­tra­dic­tions: between the dis­par­i­ty of col­lage and the integri­ty of the pic­ture plane, between the affir­ma­tive archi­tec­ture of the cross and the uncer­tain­ty of still life Van­i­tas, between clas­si­cal mod­ernism and goth­ic uncouth.

Cor­re­spond­ing approx­i­mate­ly to the scale of the body, with out­stretched arms, six or sev­en paint­ings are struc­tured by cross or totem. Shards of torn can­vas, issu­ing from an inco­her­ent archive strewn upon the stu­dio floor,are var­i­ous­ly inscribed with lin­guis­tic and pic­to­r­i­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions and incor­po­rat­ed as col­lage in a rela­tion­al order of fig­ure against ground, the body upon the cross.

What are we to make of these dis­cor­dant cul­tur­al motifs, where part-images derived from the reper­toire of nine­teenth cen­tu­ry clas­si­cal paint­ing are con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed by the brash logos and seem­ing­ly inde­ci­pher­able graph­ics of heavy met­al hard core cul­ture? At one lev­el, Persson’s paint­ings engage the for­mal­ist ten­den­cy towards con­flict res­o­lu­tion, where­by incon­gru­ous objects are inter­nal­ly arranged to bring about the sin­gle fig­ure cross-a sign­post of mod­ernist iden­ti­ty.

Nev­er­the­less, an aes­thet­ic of frag­men­ta­tion and melan­choly per­vades-a pre­dis­po­si­tion which sug­gests not so much the mourn­ing of painting’s sig­ni­fy­ing func­tion, but rather an inves­ti­ga­tion of fin-de-sié­cle deca­dence. Whilst Paint­ing 1995 bears the char­ac­ter­is­tic hall­marks of Persson’s ear­li­er ‘black paint­ings’ — veiled, per­cep­tu­al­ly com­pli­cat­ed and elu­sive in space — the cen­tral­ly locat­ed skull invests in tra­di­tions of alle­gor­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion, as a sign of death and decay.

Indeed, all sev­en works are redo­lent with images of the Van­i­tas — skulls, ribs, tat­toos, a dag­ger. These memen­ti mori, tra­di­tion­al­ly employed to remind the view­er of the uncer­tain­ty and tran­sience of life, are fur­ther elab­o­rat­ed through Persson’s appro­pri­a­tion of texts and signs from the con­tem­po­rary cul­ture of ‘death met­al’. The goth­ic cloak and dag­gerism of Hel­signør and Emper­or, bears wit­ness to an aber­rant pop cul­ture which adopts ‘endism’ and apoc­a­lypses its creed.

The end of the mil­len­ni­um may be char­ac­terised by two com­pet­ing ten­den­cies: the apoc­a­lypse and kitsch of fin-de-sié­cle deca­dence, and a philo­soph­i­cal mien of self-reflex­iv­i­ty and rede­f­i­n­i­tion. It is towards the lat­ter that Persson’s paint­ings tend. Whilst the hard core antics of Scan­di­na­vian death met­al are seem­ing­ly with­out deco­rum, and uneasi­ly incor­po­rat­ed as decor, they are invoked by Pers­son nei­ther as trans­gres­sive nor con­sumerist aes­thet­ic. Rather, like the tat­too, they are mark­ers of iden­ti­ty, embell­ish­ments of the body and signs of cul­tur­al excess.

A tab­u­la rasa describes a writ­ing tablet from which the text — often a body of laws — has been erased, and which is there­fore ready to be writ­ten upon again. Stieg Persson’s paint­ings might be under­stood as tab­u­lum rasa, as black­boards or screens, where con­tent is at once with­drawn, yet rein­stat­ed, recon­fig­ured in the pres­ence of the body. Each work func­tions to both receive and project con­tra­dic­to­ry cul­tur­al his­to­ries. The lega­cy of a nine­teenth cen­tu­ry tute­lage is medi­at­ed through col­lage and abstrac­tion to enact a crit­i­cal con­fronta­tion with the present.

Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue
Stieg Pers­son — Death’s Head Abstrac­tion
lev­el 2 projects Art Gallery of New South Wales
Feb­ru­ary 10 — March 17 1996