Albert Johansson and Jan Vermeer

by Professor Oscar Reutersvärd,
(Published in Paletten No 1 – 1979)


It is an interesting choice I have been confronted with in characterizing only a few of the paintings in the production of Albert Johansson. For several reasons I choose “Jan Vermeer, I” from 1978.
It is his latest painting – and maybe most beautiful. It is also an important brig in the puzzle because it reflects the consequences of the three logical steps that Albert took in his artistic life.

The first step took him into a frantic light-flaming picture world. It was the young Albert, who with the highest possible visual decibel, wanted to yell out his artistic credo. I have never born witness to a more reckless fight with the colors, as when he at that time started to work with his white colors. What made this fight so dramatic was that he had not yet found his method of expression. He did not know how to verbalize himself, but this he knew: only the white color was useable for him.
  Therefore I see this first painting as the terrifying call to attention for execution, as the drum whirl at the execution place. This death reveille was not followed by a second act for many years. It brought on a vibrato with the viewer, that at the time was impossible to define for those who tried to explain Albert’s paintings. I reached out and used analogies from musical terminology and called the effects from the pictures “white noise” or “visual rumble”.
  Albert’s vibrating colored surfaces had nothing to do with the constructivists refined experimental form. Maljevich’s white square could not be mentioned in the same day as Albert’s nervy picture surface. His paintings were almost pure muscle work in the mortar tub. He started of more carefully with Beckerstubernas common zinc white, but this did not suffice for rewriting his inner tumult. Eventually Albert found his creative materials, concrete putty and distemper, a heavy and sticky substance, which he could plaster on, in thick, rough layers on his usual wooden panels.
  What these building works meant to Albert, I came to realize fully, when we together studied the reviews from the debut expo in 1955, at Samlaren in Stockholm. He only displayed large white-paintings. When it turned out that many critics, saw Albert as a type of landscape poet, who praised his snow covered province of home, he became very upset.
  When one of these “half blind” writers interpreted the violent fever curves, that Albert had carved diagonally over the surface of the painting, as ski-slopes, I thought that he would run out and hang himself, from one of the light poles at Birger Jarlsgatan.
  Then the artist took his second step. He had found his theme, the guillotine began its work, and the heads were rolling to the hundreds onto the floor of the stage. Out of the white concrete surface grew first human faces in the form of collage, later bodies in mass production. These relief pictures from 1961-66 were Albert’s theme describing the civilization fraud, that our epoch has been guilty of and which we all gullibly have participated in. He mocked us, because we rather than standing up straight, allowed the bureaucracy and the technology to create the sheep pens that we had been driven into.
In the mask relieves Albert let us stand in the pillory with our cut off heads, torn up as pitiful commodities, in the matrix pictures we could recognize our headless bodies packed like sardines in a can.
  After the first hard blows, the social satire got refined and developed depth in an interesting way. In the “Trafikbilderna” from 1966-73 we could deduct frightening future prognoses and prior warnings, predicting a coming technocratic hell, unless we radically re-thought. But the pictures also started to entail hope giving traffic signs that directed us towards exits from this threatening inferno.
  With this optimism Albert came to his third step, into the later years production, the long row of “Naples-pictures”. These are dream visions, that developed through his happy experiences during his travels in the South of Europe, mostly from his visit in Naples and most of all through the white laundry, hanging on the lines between the houses in the narrow Naples allies.
  Here we are, back in the light that radiates out from the whiteness. We can further establish that it is the light, which Albert constantly uses as his most important mean of expression. “The White Noise”, in his early paintings was nothing more than a violently focused light of reality. This transgressed into the satire and the hell professing in a sort of artificial and sometimes sickening spotlight. In the Naples pictures we can witness how the light successively is sublimated into a softer and more beautiful supernatural shimmer. In reality it is symbolically created light that surrounds Albert in his memories from Italy. The artist has thought himself back to the impressions from Naples, where people seemed to live in a sort of harmonious coexistent. As a way of re-writing this sense of happiness, he saw the sun reflections in the sheets and the linen hanging to dry between the houses.
  I recon, that Albert with his Vermeer painting, have taken the fourth step. The artist himself is partially right when he counts it into his Naples series. The painting belongs with its outer appearance to this suite of works. The same crisp type of composition, drawn in by fully painted couture lines, the laundry line with the white cloth is found at its place, as is the small magical Naples yellow rhomboid. But here Albert has surpassed a deeper laying boundary.  His own subconscious has grasped this. Purely by instinct, he baptized his painting while he was still working on it, to “Jan Vermeer”.
  So he named it after a great artist that he had admired and been fixated with for over two decades. It is the bewitching of the crystal clear light in the admired Dutch artist’s atelier interior that now started to show. When I pointed out this addiction, Albert said: “ Certainly I am influenced by Vermeer van Delft and that means, according to my opinion, that it is the cleanest purist of the art history, that has influenced me”.
  Albert Johansson has in other words reached great and liberating clarity. He has cut off most of the connecting strings to our complicated reality and lifted up his picture world into a sort of ultra clean timelessness. But it is still the lighting within the picture that creates the main theme. About this painting can most clearly be said, that it portrays an Albertjohansson’s atelier, thoroughly lightened by a most wonderful Jan Vermeer’s light.

Translated by Anette Lindegaard