Forslund, Leonard

The Swedish-Danish visual artist Leonard Forslund has followed the ever-changing agendas of his painting instead of honouring the art market’s expectations of yet another ‘Forslund’. Some original and sometimes very beautiful works have come out of this. As a researcher who is constantly testing the validity of his hypotheses, he challenges paint¬ing as a category. Many of his works are a kind of painting-installations that relate to dimensions, moods and colours in the spaces where they appear. This could be seen at full force in his impressive, space-exploring exhibition ‘you – us – them – I’, which filled the Lund Kunsthall in 2003, and where he gave walls and corners certain inscru¬table and not rarely humorous additions. The walls were made to speak – so to speak – and painting as a concept gained certain new material and visual dimensions. Forslund is painting’s answer to the ‘system poets’ who constantly set up new rules in order to write their way to unconsidered and unnoticed perceptions of language and reality. He came out of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1980s – with all that implied of postmodernist theories that waved goodbye to the grand narratives and emotive art in favour of works with a cooler, more philosophizing bent. Today for example he still renounces art that simply churns itself out and becomes a projection screen for the creator’s whims and inner demons. Forslund is a conceptual artist, minimalist and romantic all at once, ‘for it doesn’t do any harm if it’s beautiful, but you should also have something to think about inside the beauty’ as he puts it in his unmistakably Scanian-accented Danish. With surgical precision and fre¬quent use of silhouettes of forms and figures taken from the voluminous storeroom of art history, and with his rational approach, he nevertheless manages to create dream images that communicate with the more irrational sides of the viewer. Lisbeth Bonde Danish Art Critic and Journalist

Assistance I
2012
Acrylic on canvas
180 x 180 cm

Assistance V
2012
Acrylic on canvas
180 x 180 cm

Enklav / Bombfabriken
2010
Acrylic on panel, woodframe
83 x 125 cm

Enklav / Antikristkyrka
2010
Acrylic on panel, woodframe
42 x 62 cm