Jättens milda steg / Giant’s Gentle Stride, 2021
Jackson Hole, Wyoming - Tayloe Piggott Gallery is pleased to present A Certain Kind of Stillness, a solo exhibition of work by Swedish painter Susanne Johansson, on view November 3rd through December 4th, 2022. An artist's reception will be held on Thursday, November 3rd, from 5 - 7 pm. The artist will be in attendance. All are welcome.
A Certain Kind of Stillness presents a selection of wooded paintings large and small that hold a mirror up to ourselves as viewers, circumventing our conscious reality and replacing each of us as temporal beings in nature. Each painting feels like a different dreamscape one can enter, exist within, and experience individually.
Johansson, in her poetic voice, both in paint and with words, urges the viewer to find the stillness to enter this subconscious world of nature, where we are mere visitors in the realm of animals, insects, and trees:
I find a certain kind of stillness in the encounter with the overlooked and simple. In the things we rarely give a greater meaning I find a sense of home:
The backlight on a September day when I recognize the thistles and the field scabious in the fields of Uppland.
A microcosmos that is a stump of an oak tree.
In the lowlands of Färnebofjärden a new synthesis of colors has been formed due to the light, the tree trunks, the earth and the leaves.
The many layers of time in a large oak tree that has become one with the surrounding landscape.
Behind everything and within all the knowledge that everything is temporary.
Among the dry leaves and grass, a quiet day in October, I sense a presence that is greater than our individual light.
The repeated theme of a solitary figure immersed -engulfed, even-in a woodland places Johansson apart from the human-centered landscape one finds throughout art history (e.g. Caspar David Friedrich, Edward Hopper, Camille Corot). That feeling of a figure hidden, nearly imperceptible but not quite one with the forest, references fond memories from the artist's childhood in a rural community in northern Sweden. Growing up spending time in the woods was an experience of total freedom. Hunting with her father or exploring with her brother and sister, "I was never scared," she says, of the wild animals in the landscape. "Yet somehow, we always felt as though we were visitors in someone else's space. Like when we were walking in the forest picking berries, and the great grey owl came. You know, don't come too close." She explains further, "The landscape wasn't mine. The land belonged to the red robin in the tree. It's almost a celebration of that feeling of being close to something but not." Johansson's landscape is one you may enter, and explore, but perhaps not fully embody.
For more information:
October 26, 2022
