The Weight of Simplicity

Everything that Mats Gustafson directs his special attention is destined to be turned into something precious. It awakens an existential want in the viewer. Liquid, bleeding fields of colour, both conquering and mimicking nature. Nature and fashion: no other Swedish artists has so self-evidently and timelessly connected these two domains.

In the Nature, Nudes and Portraits exhibition, CFHILL and the artist have selected works exemplifying the great variety that exists within Mats Gustafson's unique oeuvre of watercolours. He has fully mastered this technique, which is perhaps the most difficult in all of painting. Watercolours, in which the collision of the water-soluble pigment and the fibre of the paper produce myriads of nearly uncontrollable, parallel event chains. It’s as though he had discovered the natural formula of creation, and could thus control the process so as to have the essence of the objects and the bodies emerge in their full, simplistic miraculousness. Mats Gustafson’s painting reaches far beyond the world of fashion. As an artist, he seems to be closer in spirit to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who also displayed a keen sense for the zeitgeist in his astute observations of the expressions of garments and bodily gestures, an aspect that is even more evident in his portraits.

In his depictions of nature, Mats Gustafson keenly captures the ability of human beings to identify with it. We are no more “real” than a rock on the shoreline. Landscapes and our human attitudes to nature have constituted their own artistic genre at least since the early Renaissance in late 15th century Europe. Curiously observing your surroundings is, equally, a way to catch sight of yourself. A fir tree, a rock, a horizon. It’s all about us.

This summer, museum director Bera Nordal produced a grand, ambitious exhibition at the Nordic Watercolor Museum, which touched on all aspects of Gustafson’s varied oeuvre. That exhibition clearly established Gustafson’s place in Swedish Art History, where he belongs on the same branch as Karl Isakson and Ivan Aguéli, and the great Japanese ink painters. CFHILL is exceptionally proud to have been granted this opportunity to present Mats Gustafson’s relevance and mastery in an extensive solo exhibition in Stockholm.