Gerdman Gallery is delighted to present Note: when you return, you were already here, Anne Sofie Djernis' second solo exhibition in Stockholm.
Anne Sofie Djernis approaches painting as a sensing and feeling body engaging with a world saturated by information. Her practice takes existing figurative material as its point of departure; not as subject matter but as surface and resistance. The medium is never neutral; it arrives already mediated, and it is precisely this quality she works against. Painting becomes a means of contact with material, with sensation, with images that have already passed through the world before she touches them.
Her process is physical before it is conceptual. Often alternating between newspaper and canvas, Djernis paints against her source material, driven by a wish to connect with the body's more abstract sensations, the ones that precede or escape what an image can hold. The newspaper is not incidental: it is a surface already thick with information, asking to be read. Painting on it is an act of interference as much as making. The canvas offers no such resistance by default, and so Djernis brings the resistance herself, through the insistence and repetition of the gesture, and the refusal to let a surface settle.
The source image employed is not transformed so much as worn down. Through accumulated pressure and the persistence of the body working against the picture, the source gradually recedes. What Djernis is after is the friction between wanting to mediate an image and wanting to destroy it, two impulses she does not try to reconcile. What is left registers the force of that encounter. The works in Note: when you return, you were already here do not illustrate a process; they are its aftermath, surfaces that hold the trace of something that has already gone. The paintings are not crowded; they have the quality of things that have been through something.
The exhibition began with a question Djernis asked herself after her previous solo show in Stockholm: who is this work for? She decided it was for her mother. What followed was not a theme but a direction, away from message and toward sensation, trusting the body over the insistence of the mind. The title holds this quietly. These are paintings that do not try to arrive somewhere new; they insist on what was already there.
