Text for Catalogue, Watercolors 2012

'Through models and descriptions, we can make reality emerge, and we have no right to shy away from what becomes visible.' Sivert Lindblom (1974)

One cold March day, while hiking, I pass a strange, chalk-white sculpture in the forest. It is just over a meter high and consists of a debarked tree trunk, split at the top, with a stick deeply inserted into the crack. The smooth white surface glows in the dim light. The form is completely alien to its surroundings, a spring-wintry bare thicket on the edge of a field. Later, I learn that it is a device hunters use to provide salt for deer and elk. The game has licked up the salt that has run down and colored the trunk white.

On my next visit, a new salt lick is in place, and the sculptural effect is absent. When the functionality becomes visually discernible, the object becomes a thing among others – certainly an artifact, distinct from nature, but no longer a sculpture.

Sculpture obviously has to do with the alien, with the separation from the everyday, but that is not why Sivert Lindblom comes to mind. Nor is it because white-painted branches are a recurring feature in his works, branches lashed to frameworks and given various serial placements in the art space, out in the forest, or as pictorial motifs; different representations and placements that, of course, also change their material expression and complex of meaning. But the relationship between the salt pillar in the forest and Lindblom's artistry is not primarily visual, nor is it particularly interesting because it almost overtly points out the importance of context in ensuring art's identity and capacity for differentiation.

What comes to mind is that which precedes form, its preconditions and causes, the becoming of form, or in a more active, artistic sense – the shaping of form.

In Sivert Lindblom's world of form, objects often appear as the result of a process, the consequence of a method (casting, turning, binding, measuring, etc.) and a specific material (wood, lead, clay, bronze, rope, etc.). The form is what remains. Thus, a tension arises between the form's expression and its underlying conditions, its genesis, in which the artistic will and ability constitute only one component of an (from a material perspective) innumerable number of formative factors: geological, biological, physical, chemical, cultural, mechanical, economic, etc. The form thus points beyond itself, towards a range of rational, random, or automatic influencing forces that the art creator must more or less consciously relate to.

Lindblom's palpable endeavor to minimize or isolate the artistically subjective element – that which can be perceived in terms of generality, neutrality, or scientific rigor – can similarly be understood as a way of highlighting circumstances that precede the form's expression and are revealed through it. Therefore, for example, he retains the format of factory-cut paper in his watercolors and allows the colors to be pure and unbroken: they constitute actual, given elements in an expanded – and thus problematized – design.

With this perspective, the concept of objectivity gains renewed relevance. Historically, the objective – especially in 20th-century modernist architecture and industrial design – has denoted precisely the endeavor to 'make reality emerge,' which is the young Sivert Lindblom's declaration of intent. But here it is not about depiction, nor about a kind of technical-logical necessity, but about an understanding of form as precisely formed – form as a consequence of circumstances, as an outcome.

'The wonder is not that things are as they are, but that they are not entirely different' is a quote that recurs in Lindblom's bibliography. This means that the obsession with the object (characteristic of our culture) gives way in favor of the conditions of becoming, beyond the anthropocentric interpretive framework.

Lindblom's art-making can be said to attest to an evolutionary approach – especially if one disregards the connotation of perfection and progress that adheres to the concept, for what Darwin ultimately showed was the dynamism in the diversity of organic life and the immense significance of chance as a formative element.

Lindblom's art has indeed been called posthumanist in that it uses the human figure as a depersonalized sign, but I believe the premises for such an understanding must be nuanced. The posthumanist does not spring from a negated – and therefore paradoxically maintained – human centrality, but from the insight that form constitutes only a temporary and partly random material composition; the consequence of an infinitely extended and complex natural or cultural process that neither ceases nor concludes with what we conventionally call sculpture.

We no longer see an Egyptian pyramid, but a monument to slave society; not a new mobile phone, but the Arctic extraction of trace metals; no longer a pair of sneakers, but the working conditions in the factories of the so-called post-industrial society. No longer a sculpture, but the consequence of a set of repressed and immaterial conditions that only art has the power to evoke.

Catharina Gabrielsson