Martin Ålund
TIME
I ground the canvas in light red. All that follows will push back against the expected resonance of the vibrating nuance.
I photograph places, events and moments. Sort out and select images that could work as potential points of entry, first drafts, originals for future paintings. But it only becomes clear when the motif is tested against the drawing.
I draw an image in tinted charcoal. A limited palette with a specific light. I redo, adapt, dissolve and depict. The material quality of the charcoal affects the motif. An unclear clarity. An ambivalence. I depict, sketch, erase, draw forth. I let the drawing rest. Re-draw.
I have started using photographs again as a point of departure. It has been a while since I did this so consistently. For a long time, I felt restricted by the photograph. It is as though my artistic practice goes in circles, with certain reocurring themes. Never the same circle, however. Instead, it’s a spiral.
I am not interested in precisely depicting the photographs. I use the motif of the photographs quite freely in order to create figurations through an immediate depiction. Through the use of layer upon layer of drawing and painting, the depiction is transformed into a more poetic and intuitive narrative. Bearing associations to films by, among others, Tarkovsky, Truffaut, Antonioni, and Fellini. It is as though old narratives and pictorial worlds that were important to me in my youth are suddenly returning and being re-read.
The motifs. Encounters between man and location. Everything becomes a backdrop and a stage. A transition, and the search for where and when the transformation takes place. Transience, eternity and perception. A feeling. And on my hands: charcoal and paint.
And then the oil paint takes over. The true light and darkness seek their way forth, and the motif transforms into painting.
Blends of cinnabar red, ultramarine blue, light cadmium yellow, burnt and raw umber and mixing white. And on occassion other very specific hues: Indigo. Crimson. Ivory Black.
The painting itself presents new pictorial worlds. A resonance and a narrative emerge in the material itself. Time exists in the matter. Layer upon layer. Wipe off, paint on, paint over, wipe on. As if slowly revealing and developing something else lying hidden in the motif of the photograph. The elusive, impossible and obvious.
The painting is allowed to rest.
It often ends up demanding that I adjust something. But not until later. Time needs to come in the way. Here is a force that I have no choice but to yield to. To have faith in. It is as if the painting needs time away from me, time alone in the studio. In order to slowly reveal itself.
To forget and see anew. Rediscover. Again and again. To see that everything is the same, yet not at all.
Everything will end in questions. The unfinished and finished will balance in the spaces inbetween. There is no now, and yet only a now that is an eternity. A time span that both reveals itself and remains elusive at the same time.
Translation by Richard Griffith Carlsson
MARTIN ÅLUND, Efterbild / Afterimage, Ellerströms text & musik, Stockholm 2026