Simo Bacar is delighted to announce the opening of Lineage, an exhibition by Viktor Fordell, the Swedish artist’s first solo show with the gallery, presenting a selection of recent photographs, collages and paintings.

The works of Viktor Fordell reject the idea of subjectivity and style. His playful exploration of content – the multiplied, the anonymous, the everyday – suggests that images do not necessarily capture an isolated moment or revelatory composition. The viewer already knows what could materialize within a frame: nothing is unknown. Using bold stylistic variation and careful attention to subject matter Fordell plays with this idea as a prerequisite. The result is complex and self-referential images: individuals are generic, young, engaged in random activities; objects appear as things, without amplification or effect; bubbles and membranes appear to separate, to disengage. Is repetition a form of delay? This intricate ‘disintegration of style’ produces an uncanny effect that both mourns and resurrects the idea of documentary photography.

If ambiguity and doubt influence Fordell’s photographic practice, his collage works operate entirely through seduction. Here he asks us simple questions: How does this make you feel? What belongs together? These condensed works on paper negate the static, offering the viewer a visual network of personal source material: abstract shapes, transparent film, newspaper clippings, garbage – nothing is unknown. Piled up – as if to saturate each work with time and memory – they illustrate both process and result, carefully encapsulating the decorative. 

– Jesper Strömbäck Eklund

Viktor Fordell (b.1990, Stockholm) lives and works in Stockholm. The artist studied Fine Art at Konstfack, University College of Arts in Stockholm, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. His work has been the subject of exhibitions including: Decades, MEGA Foundation; Solna Centrum, The Loon, Toronto; Inmost Light, Sorbus, Helsinki; Memory, Loyal Gallery, Stockholm.