Volta, New York: Willem Andersson

In the picture world of Willem Andersson the viewer is drawn into various emotionally charged spaces. We find the characters in a kind of absurd theatre where human existence loses its purpose and all communication falls apart. A seductive calm beyond time and place appears in the silence and in the act of waiting for something you know never will happen. The averted, shaded and hidden glances convey an abiding sense of loneliness and isolation.

In Andersson’s painting the expected structure is broken down and leaves behind an entire world of associations. The classical idiom of the portrait with focus on accurate depiction becomes the starting point for a reflection over a general questioning of our identity, and where a literal need for invisibility cast a pale haziness over the depicted. But the dreamlike fogginess does not cast a shadow over the memory of the past where the individual identity finally reveals that all the perceived differences are similar for all of us.