Text for catalog, Watercolors etc. 2012

A flow of ingenious constructions. Forces that weigh, press, float. Everything is fact, as in the new French novel; at once factual circumstances and fiction.

Almost countless, the watercolor drawings run like a frieze through the exhibition halls, an accompaniment or a musical leitmotif. In the series of images, there is an untiring activity of constructions, designs, and an never-ending ingenuity to arrive at the ideal solution. The objects – planks, tripods, stairs, stones, and spheres – all seem to have been taken from the same prop store; elements that often recur in Sivert Lindblom's art. Trees and hedges are more reminiscent of artifacts and backdrops than of living nature, and everything takes place on a stage whose grooved surface resembles the well-raked gravel of a Zen garden. The scene is viewed obliquely from above in a skewed, axonometric perspective.

Who is the builder? Is he a menacing demiurge or is it all just play?

The objects are game pieces in a game with given rules that limit and compel but at the same time are a paradoxical prerequisite for freedom; you can't play without rules! A way of living, of parrying the realm of necessity. The artist therefore seeks tools that limit the choices and guide the work: a technical drawing board with rulers and a protractor, not a traditional easel. And the rules of the game for color: always unmixed, directly from Winsor & Newton's paint cups.

It is factual and unromantic, like Bauhaus. No painterly elaborate effects, no subjectivism. It is the same objective exactness as when minimalists used the standard dimensions of lumberyards for their white boxes. Sivert Lindblom has applied a corresponding method in his public works, for example in the ornamental tile suite in the dark grotto of the Västra Skogen subway station: the dimensions and color of the tiles were already given, and the tile setters were not determined by considerations other than their work routines. And Sivert Lindblom's images are similarly guided by the drawing board's equipment and limitations. But the objective rules do not exclude a spontaneity in the conception itself, for every new image idea arises impulsively and unplanned – there, after all, a romantic creation sneaks in through the back door, an unconscious layer in the dream and psyche of dawn.

The technical drawing has its own fiction. Roger Caillois, the French historian of ideas close to surrealism, noted: "Technical, documentary, and scientific works present us with a series of illustrations where, in the search for the real, one encounters the fantastic." They give us more to dream about, they pose more problems, they surprise or disturb more than those works where the artist explicitly speculates on the feeling for the mysterious that he tries to convey through his works. And Sivert Lindblom precisely uses the genre of scientific fiction in his watercolors.

Here, everything seems to take place in a distant park, a solitary place or locus solus; I think of Raymond Roussel's novel where the inventor Professor Canterel takes his visitors on a tour of a park facility to show his collection of strange constructions and apparatuses.

Roussel's pataphysical novel inspired the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa in the design of the extensive Brion cemetery complex in Treviso – it is an aesthetic that is close to Sivert Lindblom.

An untiring activity on a construction site, countless drafts and proposals: it is soon completed! The utopian blue square! But not yet; utopia always slips away as the non-place that is utopia's etymological meaning. It is like in the utopian projects of the French Revolution architects Boullée and Ledoux; their pursuit of a perfected societal structure is at once a magnificent and melancholic project that oscillates between compulsion and freedom.

The suite's master builder is a Sisyphus where each draft makes him start over and over again. Sisyphus is a patient stoic, not unhappy; it is a state of mind and an attitude to life.

But something unknown intrudes into the well-ordered drawings: a black, formless stain, like a large inkblot, sabotages the order, or an inexplicable disturbance of black, plane-geometric figures as a kind of correction by an unknown hand, sometimes destructive like a metaphysical virus. They create sudden, lightning-fast, and restless movements in the image space; perhaps messengers from another world, from what Malevich called a fourth or fifth dimension: 'a geometric paradise' beyond time and death.

Existence, societal structure, technology – the dreamed solutions perhaps ultimately concern the image's own structure: the image's inexhaustible variations and possibilities.

Peter Cornell Photo: Ulla Wiggen