Restoring an image

Restoring an image:
Matts Leiderstam’s “Returned”

Matts Leiderstam closes the circle on his long-term project “Returned” with an exhibition in Paris arranged by Moderna Muséet’s Project department. Through constant moves and displacements of settings and motifs he once again unites art history with contemporary gay culture. At the Louvre in Paris he will have the opportunity to study and copy the Nicolas Poussin original “The Spring”. The resulting copy will then be placed in one of the city’s parks, one which is also the meeting place for gay men. As usual, the arrangement will be documented by the camera’s eye. And only when this photograph is projected in the gallery at the Centre Culturel Suedois in Paris will the audience be welcome.

Over the course of several years, Matts Leiderstam has dedicated himself to Poussin’s painting “The Spring”, whose romantic representation of nature became the role model for the entire phenomenon of planned town parks in the 19th century. The park was the town’s “green” lung, intended for recreation, fun and games, but also as a meeting place for couples who wanted to avoid being seen in public. Today there exists a guide specifically listing parks known to be places where homosexuals meet. And it is to a handful of these places that Matts Leiderstam has restored his copy of “The Spring”. Parks in London, New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm, and finally Paris, have hosted one copy each. These were photographed on site in the park, but were then left to their own devices, beneath the whispering cover of the leaves. Neither Leiderstam nor anyone else knows what happens to them. But that, on the other hand, is not the idea behind the project.

In Paris Matts Leiderstam will, for the first time, copy directly from Poussin’s original. Before, he has used art books to paint his copies, and that is a quite different procedure. Throughout the entire “Returned” project, the Leiderstam copying has eluded observers and critics alike. But the copies are only part of the project which, as a whole, deals more with time than with painting, he explains, with taking the time to study another work thoroughly and over a long period of time. Matts Leiderstam’s work of art is not finished until the photograph taken of the copy in its park setting is shown.

This time, the painting has been placed inside an artificial concrete cave, at the side of an equally artificial waterfall in one of the parks in Paris. The photograph taken here will then be projected onto one of the walls in the gallery at the Centre Culturel Suedois. The lighting in the room has been arranged so as to resemble a late blue dusk. Here, also, is an open door in the floor as a reference to the hidden, secret and dangerous. For it isn’t only the attraction between men which might be taken as a threat to the norms of the society. The meeting places themselves, known for scenes of brutal violence, can be taken the same way. The many versions of Poussin’s portions of the beauty of nature, which Leiderstam’s “Returned” project presents and represents, thus contain both ideal and divergence, protection and vulnerability, history and present. And where Leiderstam ends, these matters still occupy the thoughts of the observer.