Peter Wallström's paintings borrow fusions, disturbances and upheavals from 
the dream world. The pictures are more  scenography than landscape, more 
simulations than objectivity. Much like the dreamer may experience a sense 
of deja vu, the paintings evoke a sense of confusion. Segments appear to 
float up from past experiences, memories or things that are almost passed 
over. In Wallström's images are reflections of both personal recollections 
and pieces from our collective consciousness. Fragments from art history 
mixed with pop culture elements and own experiences. The pictures are 
composed as uniform landscapes but are in fact cuts from various segments, 
like film or the flow of images in a dream.

This area of perceptions that seamlessly flow into one another has been 
explored in literature and mass culture. Movies like Vanilla Sky or The 
Truman Show depicts the ways in which reality seems composed of images and 
phantasms. Wallström uses the canvas as a field in which the different 
stages are interconnected. Images are elements distributed as backdrops, but 
the viewer is never unaware of the zeropoint of the media: the raw canvas 
constantly popping out and sometimes taking over.

 

Curator
Emil Nilsson

 

 

About space, depth, surface, character, actors, material, colour,
light. It is all connected, but none of these elements alone can
explain the others.
The paintings can be reminiscent of a theatrical world with
elements and back drops that give the scenes a fictional feel, of
dream or fantasy. The paintings do not have much to do with
reality, or our perception of reality, even if they are not abstract.
Animals, people, trees, different kinds of buildings and weather
all exist here. The material world has left its traces, but the sensuality
in the paintings is merely a reflection with its very specific
colour register.
When I speak of sensuality and of the material world I speak
of it in several ways. That which surrounds us and we try to convey
to one another, is a means of using our senses. But it is also
the ability to, through art, create a new kind of sensitivity
in the transformation from canvas and paint to something
more than just threads of linen and pigment. It can seem so easy
the way the artist applies the paint, layer by layer, and make the
surface shimmer in different nuances, and to even make the raw
canvas shine. It is not as easy as it looks, fundamentally it is an
order made without recipe, it is based on vision and experience
(painters, like blues musicians, usually get better and better
over time because they dare to refine their expression).

 

Author & critics
Thomas Millroth