In Johanna Bjurström’s recent work, she uses her paintings as studies — attempts to catch and reflect on the built-in possibilities of the silence before an act. Air cannot be seen, yet sound travels through it, reminding us that we can perceive what is otherwise invisible. Her intuitions, and her search for a work’s tone, shape, surface, and eventual inherent sound, form the conditions of her practice. The pieces act as quiet suggestions of what they might play when touched by a hand or brushed by a streak of wind.
She has recently been thinking about organ cases and the ways they contain a choir of pipes within. An organ’s case is the visible wooden structure that covers its pipes and mechanisms; it houses them. It acts as a shell, but also as a chamber through which air moves. “A loud silence vibrates around an unplayed instrument,” she says. Just as an eardrum vibrates freely in response to sound waves, this space holds within it the possibility of form.
The works presented in this exhibition emerged from an urge to depict recurring images she could not shake from her mind. They first appeared as quick sketches, almost like an alphabet. Since then, Bjurström has worked with the distance created when transferring an image onto canvas—a shift in time, process, and materiality. In these works, she often replaces oil paint with wood stain, treating the canvas as a porous surface that breathes and holds pockets of resonance. The movements and rhythms present in the paintings flow with the air that surrounds them, shaping the sound of this room — this house.
- Lovie Peoples & Inês Varandas
