Roland Persson Being Mortal Hurts

Sometime in January of this year, after receiving the invitation to write this text, I went to Färgfabriken Konsthall to attend a preparatory meeting for Roland Persson’s exhibition. My aim was to gain a more detailed understanding of the project and the works to be presented so that I could better prepare these lines. For this occasion, the artist and his partner and assistant, Sofia Olander, had brought a significant collection of works — miniature replicas of multiple pieces by Roland — to present to the project’s curators, Anna-Karin Wulgué and Emilia Rosenqvist. For long moments, I watched the four of them rehearsing different exhibition possibilities, spatialising and establishing relational links between those diminutive objects within the model of the large hall at Färgfabriken. However, even knowing that this remains a relatively common procedure in the development of an exhibition, on that day, and in the presence of those small works, I could not help but consider that experience unusually unsettling. For while it did not lack an almost childlike fascination, nor a certain playfulness characteristic of games and play (are exhibitions not always games between concepts, materials, and agencies?), there was still another dimension that, for an instant, reminded me of some kind of creationist cosmogony or the agency of a divine eye and hand constructing, manipulating, and controlling a world. Something that, in my opinion, even while greatly extrapolating that specific context, could not help but appear profoundly paradoxical, or even contradictory, to the general movement guiding Roland Persson’s work — hence my momentary shudder. First, because the omnipotence and omnipresence of a creator’s hand are voluntarily and programmatically subsumed within the artist’s practice.

In his sculptural work, carried out over decades through casting the most distinct objects and bodies — whether made in bronze, aluminium, or, predominantly since the early 2000s, silicone — Persson seeks to remove the traces and expressive gestures of his hands, in favour of a process that is more immediate and impersonal, where the material marks of his body almost dissipate to give way to works of mimetic quality. Second, because within the artist’s works, one senses a permanent rearticulation, refraction, dissolution, or even mourning, of different sacred, canonical, dominant, or mobilising constructions and figures. We see this in various works in this exhibition. From Mother (2009), a large pumpkin beginning to rot and lying on blue mattresses, to the dream house, which Roland Persson associates with his father, up to The Big Long Sleep (2005), part of a corpse with female genitalia from which several mushrooms sprout. In this latter, seeing in it a possible reference to the enigmatic body of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Données, I immediately recognise the effectiveness of an action that profanes the filial bond of that founding father of contemporary art. I know that Freud is a reference for Roland, and indeed, there is something here that one intuits as profoundly Oedipal, leading us to projections of possible personal events in the subterranean genesis of the artist’s works. Still, without denying this subjective dimension in Roland’s work, the influence of the Austrian psychoanalyst lies primarily in a sensitive updating of what was defined as the “death drive”: a tendency towards aggression, the repetition of suffering, and self-destruction. Thus, we realise that Roland Persson is less interested in aerial and transcendental flights than he is in a tragic sense inherent to existence. Where no god has anything to say, where no divine hand has anything or anyone to guide. Where what prevails is pure contingency and a permanent dialectic — fundamental, constitutive, inescapable, irreversible, and untimely — between pleasure and wound, ecstasy and fall, order and turmoil, life and death. And for the artist, this is not only applicable to the human individual but to everything that belongs to the world. Perhaps for this reason, Roland Persson’s works, amid the slippery sheen of silicone, reveal impure, sordid, decadent, and putrescent territories and zones. Or perhaps it is why most of his sculptures, representing banal, prosaic, or commonplace objects and entities, even those referring to anodyne contexts, exude an aura that is simultaneously lascivious and lugubrious, yet also enigmatic, sombre, and imbued with implicit violence. And perhaps for this reason, too, the artist’s work, preserving a seductive yet paradoxically repulsive tactility, by making his productions indistinguishable from what we commonly call reality (which we have erroneously become accustomed to opposing to the symbolic and material dimensions of art), also become terribly authentic, albeit terribly artificial. Showing us, in the falsely protected space of the exhibition space, that destructive character intrinsic to the world of which Walter Benjamin spoke, in which “nature dictates the rhythm, seeing nothing as enduring and converting into ruins everything that exists.” A movement in which “History, with all that it has of untimeliness, suffering, and failure from the very beginning, finds expression in the image of a face — or better yet, a skull.” It is the ghost of this skull that Roland Persson brings us, now more, now less present, now more, now less distant. A ghost that integrates everything and in which we intimately recognise ourselves: it is the ghost that impels and the ghost that will remain after all our dreams, desires, and fantasies decay. That which lies beyond reason and beyond matter. And always, then, the “death drive”: ours, that of History, that of Nature, which unites everything and renders everything indistinct. Here, I recall the connection Ben Ware established between Freud’s Thanatos and the second law of thermodynamics. The former as a progressive disposition of organic life towards a return to an inorganic state (sundered by the original trauma that separated them); the latter, also called the principle of entropy, in which the disorder of a system tends towards a maximum, which is both its state of thermodynamic equilibrium and the point at which the system dies: the moment of heat death. It is, then, curious and extremely intelligent that in this exhibition, we are greeted by monstrous water lilies called Medusa, recalling that figure from Greek mythology who, through her gaze, would turn to stone whoever looked upon her. With that Roland thus creates a double allegory: that of nature, which inevitably petrifies us and which will also die, petrified. And if, in confronting all these ultimate and final horizons, where everything affirms itself as memento mori, we may find not only a profound meditation on human finitude but also a critique of the present ecological catastrophe, both are nevertheless treated with an unusual irony and corrosive humour. Perhaps akin to the challenge Timothy Morton poses when thinking about the same crises: that of twisting our tragedy to the point where it becomes comedy, where a sardonic smile begins to emerge. A tragic cry that becomes an audible laugh and that, perhaps for this reason, again seeks to be a scream. Where we might glimpse possibilities of reconciliation and renewal. Before, however, a new and interminable silence. And even still, we cannot help but know, and feel, that being mortal hurts.

David Revés