Bone, black, lamp, black... a second from half a second ago. Acrylic paint, plywood, wood, cast iron. 275x399cm, 207x90cm, 275x559cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2010. Photo: Sesse Lind
The installation consists of three painted free-standing walls in the exhibition space, with supports and iron weights, like a stage set. The three walls each represent cross-sections of the air space at three different positions in an apartment: a room, a doorway, another room. The contours trace the architecture: wall, ceiling, wall, skirting, floor, threshold, door-frame.
By painting these “cross-sections” over and over again with transparent coats of black pigment and alternately sandpapering the surfaces, Jakob Simonson builds up a painting that is on the boundary where images are created, or disappear, where an image is barely an image. The colour is muted and dark as night, but the names and origins of the pigments evoke figurative associations that are reflected in the title of the work: Bone, black, lamp, black … a second from a half second ago.
The spectator is confronted with an inverted representation of reality. An ambiguity arises between the painting as a pictorial space, on the one hand, and as a structure in the physical space, on the other. We are forced to go round the doorway and the rooms instead of passing through them. The space has ceased to be a space and instead becomes a boundary.