Jakob Staberg
AFTERIMAGES
It must have been that time of summer when the light begins to shift, that barely noticeable shift that nevertheless hints at the cyclically recurring constellations in the sky, but which is always overlaid by the deeply buried and esoteric truth that every event, every moment is irrevocable, lost in the labyrinthine line of time; it is the time when the night sky is still light but the contours of the mountains in the distance begin to shift into blue, and, I imagined as we were staying in the red house and could not really see, how the surface of the deep lake shimmered darkly. According to a Sudanese legend, retold in 1911 to the great anthropologist Leo Frobenius by an unknown camel driver, there was an archaic kingdom in the distant past whose order rested on the recurring sacrifice of their ruler, determined by the priests' observations day and night of the starry sky, attentive to the slightest deviation.
In the house, which had once been a prison and then an outpatient clinic, located next to the doctor's residence built in the late 1800s, images were evoked in me that resembled the products of early photography, images you could extract from reading Walter Benjamin: the dead in their Sunday best, as if those who had spent time in custody or the sick awaiting care were still present in the rooms, their gazes appearing so clearly to me, as if they were watching me, and evoking, just like the photographic processes of the daguerreotype, not only faces but gazes that seemed to observe. Then, at dusk, as the light faded beyond and over the blue-toned mountain, messages suddenly appeared on the phone, images and short films flickering on the small device. When I search for them now, they are not there, lost in the unfathomable world of machines. But in my memory, I can still hold on to the short sequences documented with an uncertain camera, probably a cell phone, where fireflies swarmed while voices and laughter could be heard in the background, and music played as if a party were going on somewhere nearby. These fireflies, whose light is said to be created when certain enzymes oxidize, and whose bioluminescence, as in bacteria, fungi, and mollusks, is energy generated by biochemical reactions in the form of light, formed a kaleidoscopic, dizzying vortex.
At night, when these distant images, filmed with an unsteady hand, with the mysterious swarming so close up that the faint voices from the ongoing party were lost in the background, reached me, it was a reminder of the missed one, the beloved brother on his expedition far away. The anxiety too, about his condition in unfamiliar Armenia, as I imagined it with its cold deserts and steppes at the low plains of Ararat and the tundra at its summit; hot and dry in summer and cool in winter, as recounted by the historian Xenophon, in his Anabasis, when describing the retreat of the Greek mercenaries that night when snow fell on their weapons, while they were asleep. Then came the exuberant reports of the quality of Armenian wine, the vodka that tasted sweet, ridiculous pictures that made me imagine just about anything. Where was he now, in what foreign worlds was he?
The fireflies creating a mesmerizing centerpiece, and in the background the drunken, boisterous voices and pulsating music, as if he had lost himself in a dazzling, hypnotic night. What did he do, the missed one? Must we worry?
And then followed the images, the first of which he called Mother, one of many titles that were to be dissolved into a single one. Its sharp trees against a red shimmering sky reminded me of Caspar David Friedrich's Abteil im Eichwald, which I had seen many years earlier in Berlin's Alte Nationalgallerie, but which now, when I looked it up on Google's randomly selected reproductions, struck me differently. Was it even the same painting? The bare black treetops stood out against a bright, shimmering sunset, while the heavy darkness of autumn already dominated the lower part of the canvas, where figures, seemingly ‘fleetingly placed’, appeared to be carrying a coffin into the monastery ruins. The ruins, the landscape in the strange light, and the figures seem to open the image to passages in time marked by an impending or ongoing catastrophe.
More pictures followed. One showed an entrance or an opening to a mountain church, which had something archaic and distant about it, and on the side, the rock face seemed to be covered in barely discernible inscriptions, like photographed hieroglyphics. Much later, I was told about the place, about the gate and its connection to the early Christians in the Ararak region. It resembled a fading photograph in which the mountain church in the high-altitude hollow had dissolved. In another image, a dam appeared next to a chalk quarry, perhaps the water had sunk and risen, and the light was clouded by the heat, making it dusty. There was a hint of disaster, and yet the feeling in the image was calm, albeit enigmatic, like a scene from one of Antonioni's late color films. But the image that struck me most, which affected me in an enigmatic and tranquil way, depicted a young man moving against the backdrop of what looked like an English park. In the sunset, the light is rendered as a dim quality, the air seems humid, and there is a heavy smell, as when autumn approaches.
He insisted on this much later, when we met in his studio, at that time of year when darkness falls early, as the playground outside submerged in a darkness like a silence, on the afterlife of a work, when, unlike someone like Philippe Guston, he knew that a painting is not something that ‘dies’ at all, but instead must compel the viewer to experience that it ‘happened’, that the painting emerged as if in a frenzy or a dream image. So it strikes him too, that something says, now it's complete, which of course must immediately be contradicted, that it's not, and the uncertainty that accompanies the question, wasn't there more? But, he says, ‘then it has left me’. In the Kiruna diptych, the central piece of the exhibition, the shifts in the sky are recorded, the mountains form layers that open up into each other, on the surface that is the painting. And he says, as he carefully handles the large canvases in his small studio, that the ‘essence’ of art is to emerge, and if he himself has lost himself in the motif, it must guide him.
Ricky was here, he says, as he pulls out another picture, showing a lonely figure in a park, actually a park in Rome where it's said that when the apostle was beheaded, three springs came up. And I feel like these figures are also in a sense ‘fleetingly placed’ there. It is always specific places that are depicted, places that testify to or embody events. If painting itself must guide, then when he has lost himself in the motif at the very moment it has left him, the gaze of another may help him see, someone who does not allow himself to be seduced, that was Ricky, and after that the image became ‘muted’, more feverish, in a way that colors the motif. Yet, he is unsure still whether the place was located on the road to Ostia, San Paolo alle tre fontane, or whether it was located near the basilica on Caelius Hill, one of the seven hills, one of the oldest. But, in the end, the meanings of the places or even the precise location, those documented in photographs and those that have emerged in the events of painting, become insignificant, yet the places painted constitute points of correlation. This is important. They form, I believe, constellations. When the constellations of the night sky, which the archaic priests studied tirelessly, no longer appear, perhaps they re-form themselves into such fleeting coincidences.
He says that the Armenian mountain church is an image that is almost disappearing, yet as the details are lost in the faded photograph, something else emerges, for as he erases, literally scraping away at the surface, light emerges. As with almost all of his images, it is a photograph that he took as his starting point. On a road trip up in the mountains, through its different zones, he found the cliff with inscriptions left there by pilgrims in the distant past. But, he says, he has begun to relate differently to the photo; he does not paint from it, perhaps the painting dissolves the photo; as if, I wonder, the painting discovers a gap between technology and magic. And so he is also, he says, afraid of finding a method, through which he would lose his sense of searching.
He displays new images, images in which figures have become almost ghostly, images of perhaps anonymous people whom photography, transformed through painting, has allowed to form a new and remarkable phenomenon. About the image of the pond and the chalk quarry, he says that they arrived there, having traveled in a caravan, as it were, and some got out of their cars, while others remained in the distance, but the sound, he says, came as if from a scene, for in the silence there was a vibrating sound that may have been nothing more than the heat itself. For him, it also became a projection surface, just like a screen from a film, or perhaps it was just a still image, captured from the flowing film. It would be that little spark of coincidence, of the here and now, where something glowed through the pictorial stylization. That was the case with the image of what I saw as an ephebe at the edge of the English park. He says that the photograph was taken at Drottningholm, during an outing where they walked through the baroque park. He remembers the park as labyrinthine, the air dusty, and the strange light before it gets dark.
It is his son in the picture, but at the same time, perhaps, once painting has regained spontaneity in the image, which at once allows it to rediscover an isolated and lost moment, one in which the future lives so strongly in the perspective of hindsight that we see it in this day, it is also a self-portrait; there, a ‘rift’ opens up, he says. The image is based on a photograph, but he insists that he does not paint photographically. Yet he can be surprised by the similarity of the face with that of its model, and at the same time it seems to him to be a face taken from the old masters, from a Botticelli. I felt that the face here was surrounded by silence, that the gaze rested in it but that it was not directed at the viewer, thereby simultaneously evading contact and arousing desire. If the motif came through photography, the image lives on in painting; that is where, he says, it comes to me. The camera certainly sees a different reality, its imagery exists in the smallest details, hidden but perceptible in the painting that follows as its afterimages, where it provides a refuge for daydreams. In the same way, I think, the intoxicating light of the night swarm gave rise to afterimages in the form of the painting's inscriptions on a surface.
Translation by Richard Griffith Carlsson
MARTIN ÅLUND, Efterbild / Afterimage, Ellerströms text & musik, Stockholm 2026