I take the words of one language, I put them into the blender of my head: Willem Andersson

A conversation between Willem Andersson and Sofia Curman

How would you describe the paintings in this exhibition? 

It's so hard for me to put what I do into words. I think that my world of words and images are unusually divided, there is a compact wall between them. When I have to talk about what I paint, it's like I drill a tiny, tiny hole in the wall, from the world of words, and then look into the world of images and am forced to describe what I see. Painting for me is completely wordless. But I can start by saying that this is the first thing I have painted in four years. I took a break from painting because I was feeling stuck. So after doing only sculpture for a long time, working on this exhibition has been my way of finding my way back to the desire to paint.

I regret the wording of my previous question. Many artists feel that they are expected to give a review of their own work, but the most exciting thing, I think, is to hear about the process, because only you can tell me about it. Can you describe how you practically proceed when you start painting?

The process is much easier to talk about. I start by quickly drawing line sketches on the canvas of the rooms that I come up with. Then I build up the motif piece by piece, like a puzzle. I have like an archive of sketches and prints that I have saved and reused. On one of the largest paintings is a distorted picture of my monstera. I took the fluorescent tubes from the ceilings in some paintings from pictures of really boring American office landscapes that I found online. Or I enlarge a small detail from a picture of a forest. So I place all these puzzle pieces together, making some sort of collage.

In these pictures, a kind of exhibition scenes appear. Humanoid figures looking at art. It's not an uncommon motif in classical painting, but I often think there's something comical, almost ridiculous about such scenes that makes them very moving. They say something about being human, don't they? Maybe that we put so much effort into trying to interpret what we don't understand. And then there is that reminder that the encounter with art is an active act, that it is about the viewer as much as it is about the work.

I think I already had work in my second exhibition called Onlookers and I always come back to those scenes. The figures that look away become in a way naked and fragile. Especially the one painting showing a group of people standing in front of two paintings – Cut From a Different Cloudy Cloth. It will be so revealing to show it in a gallery exhibition. Those who look at my painting look into a mirror.

A kind of laughing mirror perhaps? You have worked a lot with distortions of the people in these images.

Yes, when I sketch the figures, I barely look at the hand, just let it draw as crookedly as it wants. I like the twisted and ugly a lot. When I started painting, I collected family photographs taken before modern cameras existed, when shutter speeds were so slow that they were doomed to failure, and painted from them. The children were distorted and blurry, the younger the children, the more deformed, and the adults looked deadly serious after sitting still for so long. I wanted to do a version of that again, but with 20 years more experience.

A lot of finding back to the desire to paint seems to have been about going back to your early expressions. Therefore, I find it interesting that these paintings have completely different colors than your previous ones.

I actually got rid of all my old color tubes and got a whole new set. And so I forbade myself to use some colors that I always fell back to, since I started painting - ultramarine, burnt umber, raw umber, some earth green - such sullen colors. Now I have instead forced myself to paint with purple, bright orange, bright green…

You often do that. Set limits and rules for yourself when it comes to materials and techniques. Why?

I have jumped between styles and materials because I don't like being too comfortable. The purpose of the rules is for me to learn and renew myself. In a way, it's about the fact that I have no formal art education, I never went to art college. So I probably think that I educate myself, by trying new things, watching others and imitating. In these series, I have been inspired a lot by filmmakers who often build scenes based on a color theme. I have decided before I start a painting that this one should be based on, for example purple and red.

Tell us about the title of the exhibition.

The exhibition title is borrowed from a poem by my friend, the poet Liz Clark Wessel. I have borrowed from her poetry before, and I have done covers for one of her books. Some of her sentences sort of "leak out" naturally into my visual world.

Is that how you find your titles in general, that they "leak out" from something you're reading?

Yes, or from something I write myself. I write a lot, but as in a stream of consciousness, almost always by hand and completely without thinking. When I read what I wrote, I can find something that resonates with me. I also listen to a lot of radio and podcasts when I paint. The title of one of the largest paintings, Dämmerschlaf, comes from a documentary I heard about a kind of anesthetic method from the beginning of the 20th century that began to be used in a maternity clinic in Germany. A mixture of strong painkillers produced a state in which the woman was only awake enough to be conscious, but did not perceive the pain. After the birth, the whole incident often disappeared completely from memory. The method then became super popular in New York, and first-wave feminists in the United States demanded that the Dämmerschlaf method would be the standard in American maternity care in the United States. The church put an end to it because it was believed that it was the woman's lot to suffer in childbirth. Dämmerschlaf means "twilight sleep", and I thought it was fitting - my pictures are quite dreamlike. I felt it seep into the painting I was doing when I listened to that show.

Your style of painting is difficult to place in terms of time. It is full of references to classical painting, but sometimes also “lower” expressions such as cartoons or illustrations. It feels disrespectful in a liberating way towards the history of art.

Yes, people refer to all sorts of eras. A friend here in Österlen, where I live, called it “Psychadelic Art Deco”. And another friend, the dramatist and artist Dimen Abdullah, sent me a picture of a painting by the Italian rococo painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and wrote that it could have been my painting. I didn't know him, but I was happy, it felt so related even though it was like 250 years apart. Now I am completely smitten with him.

Sofia Curman, Stockholm, 2023

Photo: Ellinor Hall