In the lee of land: Willem Andersson

Willem Andersson
In the lee of land
by Samanda Ekman

Willem Andersson’s painting is dreamlike. In dreams, everything is both familiar and strange. The shapes and colour fields appear to be in motion; something is taking shape—though it’s unclear exactly what.

Clothes, hair, and fabrics form silhouettes that somehow feel both surprising and completely natural. Light falls unevenly across delineated fields that resemble walls, while human figures hover in a state between dissolution and emergence. Turquoise, purple, umber, ultramarine, and coral pink come together to build spaces—rooms, or perhaps landscapes—where colour interacts intuitively.

The abstract is just as present as the figurative. There is no hierarchy in the composition. Andersson’s painting may begin in the personal, but it develops into something almost impersonal, more universal.

In his working process, the hand knows more than the head—similar to the spiritual process through which sacred images are created in Hinduism and Buddhism. When thought starts to take over, let it go and return to the movement.

The ideas embedded in the works are reflected in the titles, drawn from Andersson’s own archive of texts, books, memories, and phrases. Titles such as End of Matter and The Ache of Atoms bring to mind the world of physics, where revolutionary observations have recently been made. For example, this year’s Nobel Prize winner has made discoveries that suggest reality may not be as solid or self-evident as it once seemed.

In other words: the world is in flux—until consciousness, or observation, determines what it should be.

Perhaps Andersson’s paintings do not depict a dream, but reality itself—the one our limited ability prevent us from seeing.

Willem Andersson (b. 1980) in Helsinki, Finland. Lives and works in Virrestad, Sweden.

Andersson works with painting and sculpture, in a way that is ever-changing and evolving. Refusing to be stagnant and to have an easily recognizable style, Andersson, who is mainly self-taught as an artist, have worked with paintings as almost mental diary notes, reflecting his personal life and family history, to abstracting parts of the paintings into sculptures in wood, metal and 3D-printing. 

In the last years, Andersson has returned to painting, after focusing on sculpture, and to critical acclaim he lets his way of painting be influenced by various sources, such as digital sketching, films, history of ideas and art history. The artist himself touched upon the mix of sources and styles and its mechanics in the exhibition title from his solo exhibition at Belenius in 2023 ­– I take the words of one language, I put them into the blender of my head. The language, one guesses, is the language of art or maybe of seeing or the act of painting. In the, often monumental, paintings, the subject seems to be seeing, or watching. In what appears like stages, or movie sets, the viewer is watching others, gazing at art works in galleries, at windows, away from the viewer of the painting. The character, the depicted viewer in Andersson’s elaborate stage sets, is a timeless creature, sometimes dressed in contemporary garments, sometimes dressed in art deco style attire, but always in some ways twisted and distorted, reminiscent of something familiar, but at the same time eerie, unheimlich, to borrow terminology from Jentsch and Freud. 

Maybe it is all an allegory, of how the viewer, or the artist, can never quite grasp the true essence of art. How we are always trying to extract the meaning, the truth of an artwork and thus rob it of its essence, the alluring qualities we are drawn to, and the same time frustrated by. Andersson and the viewer of his works can revel in the frustration and desire that art creates, without the success and ensuing disappointment of being able to decode the paintings.

Willem Andersson has worked with Belenius since the gallery’s opening in 2006. He is represented in many prestigious private collections and in the Swedish Public Art Agency collection. Solo shows include Nancy Margolis in New York, Galerie Forsblom in Helsinki and Sotheby’s Stockholm. In the lee of land will be Andersson's eighth solo show at Belenius.