The Swedish artist Lavinia Jannesson focuses on the hard-to-decipher layers that time causes. Her meditative paintings, which can be seen in the exhibition ”80/20 or Familiar Grounds” at Boy konsthall, have been created with the help of multiple layers of semi-transparent paint and graphite. They can in a way be seen as draped windows: something figurative is lurking behind it, but it is unclear what it really is. Jannesson is inspired by the restorative work processes by the art conservator and her paintings often take a long time to create. There is something highly archaeological about this exhibition, but its sublime tone also brings to mind the romantic concept of ”Sturm und Drang”. These works are characterized by a longing to long for something. In some cases, Jannesson has been inspired by a detail in a painting by, for example, Monet or Dürer and has enlarged them so that they are no longer recognizable. Other works lack an index: they refer only to themselves and the repeated layers of colour. Her paintings thus seem to refer to both art historical classics and digital photographs, whose motifs become strongly pixelated and abstracted when enlarged.

Text: Sara Arvidsson, art critic