Untitled
Marcus and I sat at a regular Malmö bar in early spring. We'd both chosen the same soup, the cheapest thing on the menu, but after the bartender informed us there was only one portion left we managed to work out a deal where they watered it down into two and we laughed at what an artist's dinner it was. Half a leek soup and a beer each.
It had been a long time since we'd seen each other and we talked about art, starting from the exhibition we'd just run into each other at (Kristina Eriksson at Ping Pong) and going back to when we attended the same preparatory art school together. Back then Marcus would mostly sit curled up in a windowsill, as if in a rectangle, with a pair of simple headphones and his gaze fixed on the canvas in front of him. In those days his paintings were almost always large and since then he's painted almost exclusively in very small formats. Now he's beginning to open it up.
I remember when Marcus came home from his exchange in New York having gone through a minor crisis. He was in therapy and had started using more colour. It sounds a bit banal to bring it up here as a way of psychologizing his practice, which would of course be unfair, but something loosened there as well.
Among other topics at the Malmö bar, we exchanged different kinds of spiritual anecdotes. Marcus told of a Buddhist monk who'd been tasked with answering a specific question from his master, and who, on his way to the meeting, picked up a frog that had hopped out in front of him. When he got in front of the master to answer the question, he simply released the frog onto the floor. "Too intellectual," the master replied.
I told a Hasidic story from the Talmud I'd heard on the radio of a rabbi who asked the prophet Elijah whether you could say anything about whom were certain to have a place in the world to come, after which Elijah took the rabbi to a square and pointed to two figures: "Those two." "Because they're funny and can make us forget our sorrows for a while."
I'm not sure Marcus liked the second anecdote very much but I do. Because a faith that doesn't allow for humor doesn't amount to much. Marcus doesn't seek humor except in company (which our meeting reminded me of) but rather a point that is neither sentimental nor too intellectual. Just before he had recounted another Buddhist story of a sermon where the Buddha lifted a lotus flower before the gathering, and one of the monks just replied with a slight, subtle smile, making it clear that he was ready.
I connected the anecdote, if not to virtuosity as such, then to timing and in that case to the virtuosity of performing the right gesture at the right moment, while Marcus suggested the monk could have prepared himself his whole life, through hard work, to be able to meet the master's gaze with that smile at just that moment. That's what Marcus's careful preparation looks like when he contemplates a painting in progress.
I started to talk about Kafka's The Castle and about where the blessing (or smile) could be found for someone who never arrives on time or is in sync, but only seemed to reach Marcus when I turned back to how the novel's movement towards a center that is never reached (and perhaps doesn't exist) indirectly manages to describe life as it is lived at the foot of the castle hill. Marcus had before then already suggested that Kafka's K was a good-for-nothing or even an idiot who kept trying in vain and it only occurred to me after our meeting that I should have said I would like to include this good-for-nothing or idiot as well, and not only the one who spent 25 years preparing for a smile.
And maybe that says something about how we view art, about what emphasis we place on skill and in what way. Marcus places his body in a rectangle and lets it take however long it takes. Then he turns it around and barely paints at all. Then he turns it around again and paints after all.
Perhaps M in his nearly anti-painterly method could be said to be testing the bounds of nothingness, of non-painting, almost like a negative theology where the divine can solely be described in terms of what it is not, but just almost.
And it's this almost that makes up the small, still light that opens up in his reduced, near-erased, dry painting.
We probably can't call it humorous, but faintly smiling.