Mats Bergquist

" With this exhibition, I would like to tell a story.
A story that took me forty years to write.
I see the paintings or sculptures I have made over the years as vowels and consonants.
The exhibitions as detached sentences.
I'll now try to put them together.
Despite the size of the halls, there will be no epic.
At most a haiku poem. "

The majority of the exhibition Mats Bergquist now shows in the large halls at the Academy of Fine Arts was also included in his exhibition Travel in Milan a couple of years ago. In the bilingual (Italian / English) catalog of the exhibition in Milan, the title rest was of course perceived as rest and as the musical term for pause, the silence between two tones. I do not know if the word rest has any meaning in Italian, but in Swedish it is a multifaceted word. Excellent to name this exhibition.
Travel, as in erecting a monument, setting something up, getting something on its feet.
Or, traveled, someone has left the room.
But my first thought still goes to rest as in the rest, something that is left over.
At the time of writing, read an underscore in SvD (2022.01.24) and quote:

"Politics is about what can be changed, religion about what can not be changed, reason understands the world, religion relates to the incomprehensible. That with the help of rational reason we can constantly expand the limits of our insight and make our new knowledge useful so that as many people as possible get better living conditions does not exclude an awareness that there will always be a remnant that we on the one hand can neither understand nor master, on the other hand, nor avoid having to relate to ourselves. Love and death, for example. /… / That something transcends our mind is not the same as that it would be unreal and even if one is silenced in the face of the greatest thing in life, it has a name: mysteries. " (Sören Ulrik Thomsen)

Once convinced that a minimalist approach to art, where the reduction of insignificance, would lead to greater clarity, I found Wittgenstein's famous conclusion in the Tractatus "what one cannot talk about, about which one must be silent" quite reasonable. A recently published poem by Gunnar Harding made me think about something, the poem ends: "if what you can not speak / you have to sing". This is the kind of song this exhibition offers.

In parallel with the Academy of Fine Arts' exhibition, an installation by Mats Bergquist is shown in Katarina Church. Mats Bergquist has spent most of his career abroad, with exhibitions mainly at museums and galleries in Italy and Germany. Born 1960 in Stockholm, raised in Russia, Poland, France. For thirty years living in Bassano del Grappa, Italy. Lived in Skåne for two years.