Art on Nature

I passed the art gallery the other day and popped in to have a look. Two artists were on display, and they were so very different. On the one hand, Janolof Bengtsson with an exhibition called "Rent måleri" (= pure painting), abstract images with titles like "Forest today", "Beyond the hills" and "Mercy". It feels like landscapes to me, and remind me much of Monet´s paintings of his pond and flower garden.

Bengtsson says on a website for Kvirr (an association of artists from northern Bohuslän, which is in the south of Sweden) that he processes his impressions of nature in his art. The landscapes on the canvas are inner landscapes, but they have their origin in the outer landscapes. It seems to me that this is as close to the Swedish soul as one can get. It is lovely, really. A lot of these paintings had been sold, and I don´t wonder.

The other artist on display was Aron Rantatalo, a local artist whose exhitibion is called "Transition". It´s a mix of painting, collage and sculpture, and the most eery thing is this life-size cast/doll where he has turned himself into a Monchichi. Remember Monchichis? They were little dolls that were all the rage when my youngest sister was little. Perhaps Rantatalo is the same age, 40 or thereabouts.

The overall theme here is man and animal, and he says in this article he is interested in "animalisering", which leads me to a Wikipedia article in Dutch (I think) that defines it as the creation of figures that are a bit of both, like mermaids. Personally, I think of the Germanic pagan belief that each person had his or her own fylgja, which was a kind of totem, an alter ego in the animal world, as it were. An animalisation of one´s soul, perhaps.

Sorry about the photos being so crappy, I just had my phone camera on hand and it really isn´t very good. I can´t find that any of these artists have their own websites.