Text for Catalog, Watercolors etc. 2012

An inner room with outer boundaries through which time passes.

Everyone knows the difference between the experience of seeing the traces of an event and having been part of it themselves. Formative art tries to abolish this difference and make us part of what created the work. In Sivert Lindblom's seemingly scenographically stark landscapes, we are compelled to confront this phenomenon.

The unfolding, the time, and the place of the events in his images are open to us. What we see appears to be frozen moments, but at the same time, signs that something dramatic is underway. We can never be truly sure of what – when, where, and why – is missing in his images and objects, but it is still there with us in the contemplation. When we, as spectators, find ourselves scrutinizing and looking down into the spatialities he has depicted, we try to identify what we see and relate it to our own experiences. Despite their objectivity and the absence of visual emphases, such as reflections and shadows, these objects acquire a strong meaning.

The thin layers of paint on the static objects become a vibrating membrane, a skin that breathes care.

We create reference worlds to see what the staging represents. Every sub-object in his images is precise and seems to correspond with the recognizable. The similarities between childhood building blocks and futuristic architectural visions color our interpretations.

We try to trace the causes of these idiosyncratic worlds and what will happen to them. It begins as a visual game with the skewed perspective, but quickly turns into a mental reckoning with ourselves. Not with what is depicted but with what is not there.

We are accustomed to an inner logic prevailing between what is depicted and what occurs in our consciousness, that there are connections between thought and action and that this must also form the basis for artistic manifestations – that content and experience have an expressed connection.

The only interpretable aspect in Sivert Lindblom's images comes from our own mental processing. The mood becomes that which arises in us when we contemplate the logic in his images – however elusive it may seem. Here arises the dizzying thought that we are faced with something that may be incomprehensible but tangibly present in the act of creation.

What is depicted seems to be something more than what is made visible; it evokes feelings – the objects – constantly in motion, evoke energies through their temporary presence and physical emanation. It is the seemingly removed and that which awaits actions or events that evokes meaning beyond the obvious. What will we never know?

His watercolors are primarily not depictions but stagings of mental and ongoing states. The objects in Sivert Lindblom's images are like syntheses of distant and timeless remnants from prehistory. In this book (WATERCOLORS etc.) he offers us these impulses. He turns them into timeless commentaries. They are fragments of memory with emotional connections: visual impulses with sudden proximity. An embodied inspiration that has led to a unique language of form and imagery. They are not symbols – they become tools for self-knowledge when we relate to them. A common explanatory formula we use about ourselves is that we are the result of our experiences and the product of our actions. Art's greatest challenge lies in delimiting the inessential.

When one sees Sivert Lindblom's images, it is like trying to understand the laws of nature, but they are elusive and retain their own constants. The images are themselves and untouched by their fate. Even though he has entrusted them to the viewer, he can never free himself from them. Just as his images cannot be detached from their history, it is impossible to exclude that there are also references to what he considers most worth seeing.

After a long life of deciphering the formal language of the world around him, he has given us a way to see existence beyond the obvious.

Do we see the sculptor Sivert Lindblom's will to form in the images that suggest how his material can undergo transformations? Is it the inkblots, the black matter, the clouds, or the black lightning bolts that penetrate over and through the images, the unknown multitude of possibilities seeking their form and expression? Even though something seems to be happening in the images, it is not clear what it is. They depict creative processes of change, unfinished and without clear goals.

We sense purposeful efforts by something absent that intends to transform something without having an actual mission or a clear purpose. This describes the transience of what is happening. We see the protective layers. We see the shells formed by different contents. We see the molds and how they have been left to their fate. Even if we sense the creative processes required to transform one form into another, the ambiguity of the objects does not indicate any beginning or end. The viewer fills the objects with content or frees them from content.

We sense humanity's attempt to describe the presence of the idea and its attempt to place itself beside it. We search for humanity as part of its own creative process. We want to be able to face that which is much larger than ourselves. Humanity that has the courage to see: The humorous and the melancholic in transience and in creation.

We fill the forms with the idea of art and ourselves with content or we break out of the form to announce our presence in what we feel we lack. Sivert Lindblom is neither at the beginning nor at the end of this process – he is in the process between both worlds. The artist who creates to tell us that we exist. We cry out into the universe and wonder: besides the known and the unknown out there, is there something more?

Jan Öqvist