Jakob Simonson

His installation consists of three painted free-standing walls in the exhibition space, with supports and iron weights, like a stage set. The three walls each represent cross-sections of the air space at three different positions in an apartment: a room, a doorway, another room. The contours trace the architecture: wall, ceiling, wall, baseboard, floor, threshold, door-frame.

By painting these “cross-sections” over and over again with many transparent coats of black pigment and alternately sandpapering the surfaces, Jakob Simonson builds up a painting that is on the boundary where images are created, or disappear, where an image is barely an image. The colour is muted and dark as night, but the names and origins of the pigments evoke figurative associations that are reflected in the title of the work: Bone, black, lamp, black … a second from a half second ago.

The spectator is confronted with an inverted representation of reality. An ambiguity arises between the painting as a pictorial space, on the one hand, and as a structure in the physical space, on the other. We are forced to go round the doorway and the rooms instead of passing through them. The space has ceased to be a space and instead becomes a boundary.

Jakob Simonson

Born 1974 in Skara
Lives and works in Malmö

Education

2005–2008 Konsthögskolan i Malmö/Malmö Art Academy, Malmö
2000–2002 M.F.A.-program, Konsthögskolan Valand/Valand School of Fine Arts, Göteborg/Gothenburg
1999–2000 The Nordic Art School, Kokkola [FI]

Selected solo exhibitions

2009 Kulisserna, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö
2009 Synrand (i samarbete med Patrik Aarnivaara), Landskrona Konsthall, Lund
2006 Landskap måleri, Pictura, Lund

Selected group exhibitions

2009 Marabouparken, Sundbyberg
2009 On the Six-cornered Snowflake, 0047, Oslo [NO]
2009 Galleri Arnstedt, Östra Karup

Selected bibliography

Kjetil Røed, ”Naivitet, barn og spøkelser”, www.kunstkritikk.no/kritikk/naivitet-barn-og-spokelser/, 2009-05-19.
Lars- Henrik Ståhl, Sophie Tottie, Synrand (utst.kat./exh. cat.), Landskrona konsthall, 2009.
Britte Montigny, ”Svaret bakom kulisserna finns i tomrummet”, Skånska Dagbladet, 2008-11-06.