Johan Gustavsson

Fragment of an essay by Hans Theys, published in the book Drawings, Tornado Editions, Brussels 2012. In Gustavsson’s drawings we seem to meet families or small groups of friends that have become petrified icons of a fleeting world. Clocks have stopped ticking, or endlessly gnaw at us with their noisy grinding of unrealised moments of intimacy. Beautiful, asymmetrical compositions. Beautifully arrested drawings, with hesitating or sturdy, sometimes slowly disappearing lines, with clear shapes that suddenly become indistinct or messed up, with funny color patches, with teapots with juvenile spouts, with depictions of tiny hammers and thin faucets, with sockets connecting us to the outside world, with one-legged tables, miserable Christmas trees and dreamlike summer cottages, with strangely silent protagonists. Very often these protagonists are smoking cigarettes. Smoke is a funny object to draw, especially where it’s supposed to disappear, but it’s also a signal of youthful rebellion, boredom and pleasure seeking, giving oneself an attitude or slowly killing oneself. Apart from this, one might imagine an artist creating the most fabulous forms with his or her cigarette smoke, seeing the most fantastic scenes in its vortexes and sways, evoking Arabian nights, thundering ghosts or spiritual encounters. What prevails, however, is a feeling to be in the presence of a human being who went through stuff and reports about it, realising that a poetic evocation of failure can be a success. One feels a sense of relief. One smiles. Sometimes one laughs. If understatement can be hilarious, it sometimes does so in these drawings. We meet a dandy who elegantly stages awkwardness. We enter a world of sordid dreams, and are glad we escaped. We encounter art in its basic form: relating about experience, but doing so through the physical presence of an object. Because finally we have to admit that what really unsettles us are the drawings, and not the depicted scenes. Nothing is expressed here, as Moore coined it, we are just confronted with the strangest of artifacts, created by a man who escaped life and hovers over it like an all-seeing ghost. Fragment of an essay by Hans Theys, published in the book Drawings, Tornado Editions, Brussels 2012.