Text, Sculpture, Lunds Konsthall

It is no coincidence that Sivert Lindblom names most of his production "untitled". There is a refusal in him to approach a meaning, a previously existing world to which his works could be attributed. This refusal is also consistently seen within minimalism and parts of abstract expressionism.

But in his case, this refusal is not unambiguously linked to a reduction of forms, but to simplicity.

It is rather an attempt to speak never-spoken words, to demand, through things, an Adamic language, where things and names are one, where this original cleavage does not exist, a language where moral judgment has not entered. To create forms where aesthetic and religious connotations have not faded – they have never existed. Where the solemnity resting over things can entice the viewer to conjure up underlying riddles (perhaps from Kabbalah, perhaps from the rituals of the Mayan peoples), but where all such work is in vain. There is no riddle, nothing underlying in Lindblom's sculptures. What exists is a smooth or folded surface before or after human culture: a voice that does not come from a larynx. These are things that have never been interwoven into the linguistic systems that constitute the objectivity to which we, as subjects, relate when we think and see our lives.

These linguistic systems that always constitute a There, which we can never fully make into a Here, which we cannot think, make transparent to our gaze, because they form a Before, a boundary for our own subjectivity – which means one cannot "understand" works of art. When Lindblom avoids meaning, even as an anticipated meaning, he is part of the currents in our century's art that have tried to place themselves outside, beyond, a linguistic system within which everything already seems to have been expressed. The feeling of belatedness is surely the incentive for these desires for an unspoken language.

In Lindblom's case, the contradiction between this absolute demand and the first impression that strikes us – the impression of a distant, once immense magic – constitutes the tension that prevents his works from joining the series of Sisyphean attempts to create a new language. There is nothing behind, absolutely nothing, and the fact that we truly believed in an insignificant, faintly glimmering, yet still an answer, makes us, in the face of this nothing, see the abyss that emptiness, the non-meaning-bearing gesture and thing possess, the emptiness, the non-humanity, that adheres to nature.

The small cast human figures mounted on a wall are based on a casting of Lindblom's own body, made during the sixties. They are exact copies of the original model, scaled down in a workshop in Paris. Every detail, even a ring he wore during the casting, remains. But despite being extremely human-like – we might expect it to rise on its small legs – there is nothing human about it, nothing subjective. The repetition and reduction of the human body mean that its primary constituent, its uniqueness, the body, living in difference from other bodies, is broken apart, and that the human, the body, is fundamentally dehumanized. The blue, red, and black paint thrown over the figures, which "desecrated" them, is a further reinforcement of this movement. The colors are something alien to us. We are not colors.

The bronze strips placed at eye level in the room, heavily patinated in green, are Lindblom's latest works. They too are stripped bare: of all function, all meaning. They could be staffs in an ancient Native American ritual, but they do not refer to any belief; beyond their materiality, there is nothing. It is in the materials – lead, pear wood, plastic, here bronze – that we encounter completely mute nature.

Lindblom's works exist to a greater extent within themselves, a square centimeter of bronze surrounded by bronze, a universe of materiality, an airless and sightless point of non-humanity. They are placed at eye level; against the perhaps green fleshiness of the iris and gaze stands the hardness, the impenetrability of the bronze's green materiality. The horizontal line of staffs enclosing the room has its counterpart in another materiality, that of green eyes, gazes, those that sometimes halt against each other – as impossible to penetrate as the bronze.

We prefer to see an After rather than a Before the languages in Lindblom's work, rather a new, unredeemed syllable than the dream of one once spoken, now forgotten for millions of years. Not the dream of originality, no dreams at all, the waking state in a coming world where things and names are one. One could liken Lindblom's works to apnea, the Indian technique for conscious cardiac arrest, a final effort to step out of the human.

Perhaps the forms of death, decomposition, the hardness of the skeleton, bear a more pregnant image of us as humans, where we are no longer human, "humane," but entirely immersed in the silence of nature. Such an intimation has existed ever since the Egyptian burial rituals.

Lindblom is yet another witness to life's cessation.

Stig Larsson