Through the simple flick of a thumb, we scroll, save, and share the endless stream of images that shape our daily digital lives. These fragments of visual culture-screenshots, keepsakes, passing impressions-become both intensely personal and entirely anonymous, fleeting moments detached from time and place. In his latest body of work, What is gathered is not memory, Swedish painter Johnny Höglund translates this immaterial stream into the physicality of painting, re-rooting the digital in tangible reality.
Through the simple flick of a thumb, we scroll, save, and share the endless stream of images that shape our daily digital lives. These fragments of visual culture-screenshots, keepsakes, passing impressions-become both intensely personal and entirely anonymous, fleeting moments detached from time and place. In his latest body of work, What is gathered is not memory, Swedish painter Johnny Höglund translates this immaterial stream into the physicality of painting, re-rooting the digital in tangible reality.
Screenshots, the "unglamorous workhorses of digital culture," capture images already slipping away. They hold the potential of memory yet risk remaining invisible: anonymous fragments with thousands of possible meanings. In Höglund's hands, these images are metabolized and transformed, shifting from the speed of the feed, to the slower rhythm of painterly brushstrokes.
By engaging directly with the flood of online imagery rather than resisting it, Höglund reveals its poetic potential. His paintings explore how visual fragments-whether saved, shared, or scrolled past-form a kind of collective memory shaped by algorithms and gestures. The flow is the message; the movement is everything. Yet through the slow medium of paint, these ephemeral impressions are given depth, inviting viewers to re-experience them with their whole bodies.
"Painting is not a linear process," Höglund reflects. "What begins as a flick of the thumb becomes a stretch of the arm, then the motion of the brush. Through painting, I re-link digital fragments into a reality rooted in daily life."
What is gathered is not memory positions Höglund's work at the intersection of technology, memory, and materiality. By translating digital residues into painterly form, he offers not only an exploration of how we see today, but also an opportunity to pause and rediscover narrative amidst the momentum of the scroll.
