I sleep on the second floor

Andreas Eriksson’s Paintings: ‘Another Kind of Reality’

Paul Moorhouse

‘If you know exactly what you are going to do’, Pablo Picasso once remarked, ‘what is the point of doing it?’^[i]  For the great twentieth century modernist, spontaneity was essential because only through the unpremeditated act of painting could unforeseen discoveries be made.  A similar ethos stands at the centre of Andreas Eriksson’s art.  ‘Everything has to be intuitive’,^[ii] he has acknowledged.  Emphasising the need for ‘an open mind’, he added: ‘painting has its own will’.  In Eriksson’s words, there is the conviction that his studio-based activity, if freed from intention, possesses momentum and proceeds from an unknown source.  Control – though tempting – would be inimical to that process, stifling his vital responsiveness to that inexplicable motivating force, and limiting his involvement to that of simply illustrating pre-conceived images.  This raises a compelling question: in yielding to his materials and the activity of applying paint to canvas, what exactly is being brought to the surface – not only to that of his paintings, but to consciousness itself?

The title of the present exhibition, I sleep on the second floor, may provide a clue, alluding, as it does, to the artist’s physical location but also to the activity that accompanies sleep – when consciousness gives way to dreaming.  Born in 1975 in Björsäter, a locality in eastern Sweden, for the last twenty-four years Eriksson has lived in Kinnekulle, occupying a house close to Lake Vänern in southwestern Sweden.  The building is situated in a forest and its windows provide views of his natural surroundings, facilitating a sense of closeness with the outside world. This intimacy is continued during his walks in the forest, when the trees, plants, rocks, and glimpses of sky and water provide an endlessly changing panorama of colour, light and texture.  The setting also teems with animal life: birds, moles and other creatures of the forest, whose proximity he both directly observes and senses. Occasionally, birds have crashed into the windows, having been unable to distinguish reflections from the actual surroundings.  The fallen bodies provide poignant evidence of their confusion.  Molehills litter the area outside the house, intimating the presence of small nocturnal residents who emerge from the ground at the dead of night, their movements through the undergrowth concealed by darkness.  Eriksson plainly feels a sympathy for both, having made casts both of the dead birds and the molehills, which have been turned into sculptures.

This natural arena and a sense of his place within it provide a rich source of inspiration for Eriksson’s paintings.  Committed to canvas in transparent layers of pigment, irregular, ragged-edged shapes assert the painted surface, forming an interlocking patchwork-like structure.  But these shapes also seem filled with light and movement.  Arising from that ambiguity, the compositions simultaneously resist and yet also invite recognition. Apparently abstract, they sustain a tension between explicit brushwork and implications of things or places – half-glimpsed, dimly remembered, somehow animated.  

As this suggests, Eriksson’s relationship with nature is complex.  In one way, his paintings seem part of a Romantic landscape tradition whose influence he concedes. With its depictions of craggy mountainous expanse, brooding skies, forests and lakes, early 20^th century Swedish painting is a clear influence.  August Strindberg and Ivan Aguéli are among the painters he admires.  However, his response to such precedents is far removed from emulation. Rather than simply describing natural phenomena, his paintings seem invested, rather, with the essence of place – without reproducing literal appearances. Nor are they abstracted from direct observation, as if echoing the reductive imperative of Impressionism. An involvement with the material fact of paint characterises Eriksson’s approach, and his work possesses a physical reality of its own. His paintings evoke the external observed world, while declaring an entirely independent pictorial existence –  though one informed by imagination. 

This dichotomy – between looking outwards and turning inwards in a reflective way – underpins Eriksson’s activity as a painter, and it may be sensed in the arrangement of the present exhibition.  The gallery space has been reconfigured in the exact proportions of the artist’s house, and has been hung with woven copies of the windows at his home, whose sizes have been faithfully reproduced.  These panels evoke the views from his house.  Even so, being opaque, they simultaneously deny the observed landscape, acting like screens.  We look towards the ‘windows’, but cannot see through them. This is a neat encapsulation of our relationship with the external world in general.  In our daily lives, we confront an outer reality represented to us by our senses, whose mysterious nature remains ultimately  unknowable – in effect, a blank canvas.  In the same space, the installation of Eriksson’s paintings present what he has described as ‘another kind of reality’.  Rather than literal views of nature, we are presented instead with framed paintings which evoke windows onto a different world – the realm of the mind.

In philosophical terms, this represents a shift from the ‘productive imagination’ to the ‘reproductive imagination’,^[iii] the first term referring to the things we see, the second to the things we imagine.  The nineteenth century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer has explained the relation of these two kinds of imagination in the following way: 

The outer impression on the senses […] vanishes with the presence of things […]

There is only one thing, the concept, which is not subject either to that instantaneous vanishing of the impression, or to the gradual disappearance of its image […]

According to Schopenhauer, concepts, or ‘abstract notions’ as he described them, preserve our perceptions ‘in an entirely altered form’.^[iv]  Abstracted from visual experience, they contain only that which is essential.  In that form, and ‘in the obscure depths of the mind’, they mingle with our stored memories, intuitions and sensations, ‘and the clear pictures of the imagination […] are what comes to the surface in consequence of this motion’. ^[v]

This model casts light upon Eriksson’s way of working. Instead of copying the ephemeral images produced by eye and mind that are formed in response to observed external reality, he draws upon the vast reservoir of abstract mental experience that lies hidden beneath the surface of consciousness.  This forms the centre of his practice, about which he is disarmingly down-to-earth: ‘I am just in a dialogue with materials in front of the canvas’.^[vi]  By way of explanation, he has described the importance he attaches to starting with his materials, trying to surrender ‘ambition’ or ‘goals’, and being responsive.  He places a premium on suspending conscious control during the process of painting in much the same way that a dancer, in order to execute a movement, must be disciplined – and yet free.  

Considered in the context of Schopenhauer’s philosophical model of cognition, which asserts the way unconscious material rises to the surface of the mind, Eriksson’s comments take on a profound complexion.  This is particularly evident in his following observation:

There is a floating, hovering feeling that recurs in the paintings, as if they are actually reflections of something that is in the room, something real that is in the room, as if they reflect something that is on the second floor of the studio or something, like they reflect another kind of reality.

As this suggests, Eriksson’s paintings present ‘windows’ onto something that is physical and real, but, at the same time, an object that cannot be precisely grasped – something that exists ‘on the second floor’ and above the everyday.  They intimate a place of dreams where, unbidden, perceptions of the outside world emerge in altered form, as distilled essences. During the process of painting, he greets a succession of unfolding experiences in a spirit of acceptance, preserving them in structured paint marks. The application of paint proceeds, as far as possible, of its own accord.  Its rhythm attuned to his responses, the marks provide a trace of his movements within the virtual space of the painting.  Patiently, layer is superimposed on layer, the canvas forming the stage on which his brush dances.  In this way, his paintings make visible a realm of human nature whose reflected, fleeting existence we glimpse, and to which, like birds, we are drawn.  At once sensual and structured, yet arising from a conceptual source, Eriksson’s painting may be seen as belonging to a landscape tradition that it simultaneously continues and, in surprising ways, renews.

^[i] Pablo Picasso quoted in Denis Thomas, Picasso and His Art, Hamlyn, London, 1975

^[ii] Unless otherwise indicated, this and subsequent quoted statements by Andreas Eriksson are from Two Columns and a Sunny Day, film by Carolina Jonsson, 2023, 

^[iii] This distinction is made in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, Penguin Classics, London, 2007, p.150

^[iv] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol.II, trans. EFJ Payne, Dover Publications, New York 1966, p.64

^[v] Ibid., p.135

^[vi] Andreas Eriksson quoted in Osman Can Yerebakan, ‘How Andreas Eriksson Found The Answer in Freeing His Colours’, Elephant Magazine, January 2024