The idea of a house on the countryside just as realistic as I can believe in it, a picturesque village in France during a tourist trip or the opportunity to see a living mammoth wandering in the zoo’s enclosure. I have ducked knowledge, conscience and critical scrutiny and often based on own experiences and interests, affirmed beautiful ideas, dreams and fictions. But if you look closer, the image literally crack, shrink, skew, dislocate or even explode.

The word normal can hurt if you are not covered by it”

The author Martina Lowden in Dagens nyheter (Mitt skräckslagna hjärta vill tala om rädslan, 2011-10-26 when she for the first time came out as diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome. Translation from swedish by LE.

This seductive (but honest) representation of beauty that I strive for is complicated. To value in terms of beautiful and ugly, creates norms and how does this evaluation affect our daily lives? In the crafting of my works I have challenged norms about what is considered aesthetically beautiful and skilled in favor of expressiveness, individuality, physicality, unlearning, unbalance, improvisation, dissonance, distortion, atonality and more. Concepts where some are borrowed from music as music has always been the art form that can most easily put me in a state of inspiration, flow and self-confidence.

Processing and communicating this duality between wanting to become independent of and make visible the effect of fiction and aesthetic evaluations and at the same time continue to be seduced by them has been the basis of my art work ever since my time at Konstfack in the mid-90s. The initial passionate love is dependent upon looking away from the other’s faults and shortcomings. To feel good, we probably need to allow ourselves strong experiences of beauty and fiction, but in the end we need to return to understand that this beauty is always changeable, subjective and excluding. To put on the cloak, take the one ring in a chain around the neck, walk to Vesuvius, throw the ring into the volcano and in the next morning, go to work as usual.

Linus Ersson