“The lost world of ink”
“Frans Josef Petersson looks Wåhlstrands photographic painting”
“It has often been pointed out that today’s bourgeois policy is based on the well fed middle-class social self-deception. Tax relief gives the opportunity to the beautiful accommodation, home help and the constant travel, which creates a futile identification with society’s upper layer. A new ”we” is cemented, with the hijacked solidarity with the lower classes. Nostalgia for a bourgeois minnesvärld rampant in the culture.”
“No artist has well caught this tweedklädda mentality as well as Gunnel Wåhlstrand. Her meticulously rendered tuschlaveringar of familjealbumets photographs brought the early urals city of chelyabinsk interest, and the criticism was not late to pay tribute to this lost world of combed hairstyles, sailboats and well tempered upper-class environments. If nothing else, was impressed by the craftsmanship.”
“A selection of Wåhlstrands images are now displayed at the Uppsala art museum, in choosy hanging, with an emphasis on her work from recent years. At the side of the black and white pictures, the oldest from 2005, there is a room with three new paintings in color. The portrait Anna-Lena and kustlandsskildringen Hällkaret (2012-2013) form a successful constellation, where the woman’s gaze and the deep-blue surface of the water creates a play between the seen and the unseen, that goes beyond the motives and their true-to-life imaging.”
“Wåhlstrands work can be seen as the expression of a self-revealing tendency in the contemporary era, from the dokufiktioner to instagram, at the same time as the time-consuming work, giving her images an aura of the bygone era. Way to build up the paintings in thin glazes like often at a reverse the development of film, which connects the works to a idea of the photograph as a document of the passage of time.”
“at the same time is Wåhlstrands painting a product of the computer, not only for the ability to zoom in, and enlarge, the details of the models (which is a prerequisite for the high demands on the realism). But also for the ambition to return to, and give sensuous body, an experience of the photographic image as the computer has been consigned to the past. The nostalgia in her pictures is thus also a nostalgia for the photograph that minnesbärare, beyond today’s digital bildflöden.”
“There is a seriousness and a dedication of Wåhlstrand that seems to appeal to many, not least of which is the work revolves around the barndomstraumat of a father who committed suicide at a young age. Images of the father is repeated, and in the Walk (2011), she has gone so far as to completely retouch him away. What is left is a park, with an empty path that disappears into the picture.”
“Myself, I do not share the fascination for Wåhlstrands strict arbetslinje, and will need to think about what the poet Martin Högström has written about the virtuoso who tjänsteande, that virtuosity is only possible of someone who has internalized an ideology in so high a degree that it possessed the body, its inner route between the feeling, thought, and motor skills.””
“Wåhlstrands projection of an idealized melancholy could be inflammatory for anyone who is locked out of klasserfarenheten, if the works had not been so drained of imagination and the image of wealth. I can feel sympathy for the emptiness, but are imprisoned not by the. As another poet, Bruno K. Öijer, has formulated the matter: ”the rich do not interest me u002F I am glad to avoid having to have them in my presence u002Foch this is not something I think of u002Fdet is only natural”.”
