Dysmorphia, Sleeping Beauty and other stories Markus Åkesson
A shimmering green fabric, covered with little brown monkeys, hides a body. In the next painting, the fabric is a luscious floral pattern. Heavy. And then, an iridescent brocade of white and red, yet another cloth in oriental ornamentation.
Who or what is covered underneath these fabrics in the paintings?
Markus Åkesson’s series Dysmorphia from 2018 portrays bodies in postures that are normally reserved for portraits. The fabrics are seductively beautiful. The patterns are of the kind that have been popularized and reproduced innumerable times across the world. These are the materials found in homes as draperies and curtains, but they have also been popular in dresses and shirts.
But who is the person kept under a veil in the painting? And why is their body covered? Central to Markus Åkesson’s artistry is the tension between the openly and seductively beautiful and that which is hidden to the gaze. “Dysmorphia” is a medical term. It is a psychological condition where the affected patient is fixated upon an experience of bodily insufficiency. Perhaps a nose that is too large, hair that is not beautiful enough or possibly breasts that don’t have the correct shape. Soon, this fixation has taken up so much space in the patient’s mind that it affects the relationship to others and to the surrounding environment. The condition is prevalent among both men and women to the same extent and is often introduced during adolescence.
Knowing the meaning of the title, the Dysmorphia series can be interpreted on many different levels. What is it that we want to hide in our relationships to other people? What do we want to accentuate? Can our clothes, our makeup and other attributes that signal cultural association protect us in our relationship to others and to ourselves? Or are depression and related conditions in fact spiritual signposts? Are they a sort of protector in the darkness of the underworld, and a guide to those of us who stubbornly cling on to the aesthetic and physical signs connected to the stories about who we are?
Markus Åkesson’s imagery is often inhabited by children and adolescents. They find themselves between childhood and adulthood, between sleep and being awake, between presence and dreaming. In two paintings from 2018, Sleepwalker (Boy with Floral Kimono) and Sleepwalker (Girl with Floral Blouse), even the subjects’ eyelids are somewhere between open and closed. This dreamlike state runs through several years’ practice, from the portrayal of fantastic play worlds in The Woods (Escape from Kopetania), 2013, to the darker paths of fantasy and obsession in Dysmorphia.
In the series Sleepwalker, the phenomenon of insomnia is being investigated. The artworks are part of the exhibition Insomnia at VIDA Museum & Art Gallery, 19th May – 24th June 2018. As a phenomenon, sleepwalking tends to be positioned among those transitional states that mainly belong to childhood. Adults and adolescents are instead often affected by insomnia. One of the key works in the exhibition Insomnia is the artwork When they told us about the night. The painting depicts two girls, somewhere between six and eight years old. The gaze of one of the girls meets ours, but the other one is looking inwards, her chin and mouth pressed hard against her knees. The title suggests gravity in their situation. Is the notion of death making its presence known for the first time?
But let us turn to another painting also inhabited by young people in a dreamlike state. The painting is set with a wooded backdrop. It is called Sleeping Beauty. This is also the title of Markus Åkesson’s retrospective exhibition at Kalmar konstmuseum, 10th February – 29th April 2018.
In a dark wood, a light falls on a young girl who is lying in an old iron bedstead, the kind that could be found in old hospitals. The girl is surrounded by seven people – girls and boys of different ages. A woman is holding the hand of a little boy who is staring up at her. His is the only gaze that is directed toward another human. There is a whisper of expectation in this moment. What are we waiting for? Is she sleeping? Why has she folded her hands on her stomach? She is dressed in red, the colour of blood and energy, and her face is both peaceful and concerned. Isn’t it almost time to wake up?
In 2005 the Swedish government conducted an investigation regarding “apathetic refugee children”. This was a series of cases that received considerable media attention, in which refugee children seemed completely apathetic, unable to rise from bed. Some argued that it was feigned passivity, while others saw it as a natural effect of traumatic experiences in their home country, followed by the bureaucratic nightmare surrounding residence permits and the possibility of deportation once arrived in Sweden.
”Apathetic refugee children” was my own association regarding the artwork, which captured my interest the first time that I saw it in the stream of posts on social media. The painting Sleeping Beauty sparked national interest when the school that had commissioned the work, as part of a public art installation, chose to take it down. Why? The school was concerned that the painting could lead to impulses of self-harm among the students. I was, apparently, not alone in associating freely around the work’s themes.
In the end a compromise was reached; the artwork was installed in the school’s library. An appropriate place, one could say. There are many stories hidden in a library, books and sagas that stand in relation to this work. Let us begin with the obvious choice: Sleeping Beauty.
Sleeping Beauty slept for one hundred years. She slept because she pricked her finger on a thorn, just as the evil witch had predicted. Soon, a thicket of roses grew around her,
champions tried in vain to penetrate this forest, but only one made it through, kissed the sleeping princess and was rewarded with her untainted love.
Archetypes are useful, they travel through time. Many of the subjects that recur in Markus Åkesson’s work are of the kind that many of us can relate to. They create recognition associated to the world of fairy tales. They play on our imagination and the world of our dreams. Sleeping Beauty is the English name for the Swedish Törnrosa, a saga that touches upon questions of purity, innocence and true love. Universal, existential quandaries that both individuals and communities continue to wrestle with, questions that are interesting to raise within the world of education. Why then, did the school become so hesitant when the commissioned work was delivered?
A DARK WOOD
From the very beginning, “the forest” was a key part of the commission for the Swedish school. The forest is a recurring allegory in the context of learning and knowledge. I had just initiated the work of writing this text when I received an invitation to the first parent-teacher conference of the term at my children’s school in the small village of Gärdslösa on Öland. The meeting began in the school’s cafeteria. The room was crowded and reading tablets had been placed around it, all with the same image, a picture of a forest. The teachers who welcomed us had their own tablets, with the same forest picture on them. Soon it was time for the school’s principal to speak. She talked about knowledge and academic development. To support her reasoning she used the image of a forest. “To seek knowledge is akin to heading out in an unknown forest,” she said. “To wander off the path and find oneself in an unfamiliar place. To then step just a little further away from the trail.”
THE MASK THAT HIDES AND TRANSFORMS
A girl is standing in a room with showcases. It is almost possible to perceive the temperature; the air is probably cool and dry. The girl wears a mask; it is supposed to resemble a skull. But in her mask the girl’s face becomes almost that of an animal, like a figure caught in a carnival with a hint of grief. The painting is called Psychopomp Club (In Front of the Cabinet) and we meet the girl again in a second painting from the same series: Psychopomp Club (Hen Skeleton), but here the show cabinet has become the foreground. Inside the cabinet, next to layers of glass that reinforce the notion that we are observers watching another observer, sits an anatomical model of a brain.
The mask is a symbol that many of us recognize. It is a reoccurring phenomenon in art and literature. The mask hides and transforms. It touches the imagination. In the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges’ book Ficciones, there is a short story in which a mask plays a central role. The story portrays the horror of a nightmare with exact precision. In a mirror, Borges sees himself bearing a mask. What lies behind it? Who? Is the face we meet in a dream different to the one we see in the mirror – the mirror, which reflects yet another, inverse pictorial interpretation of ourselves? Is it the mask of the adult world that the children are wearing in the series Psychopomp Club? Their facial expressions beneath the masks are serious, perhaps even mournful. Or am I reading in the sorrow? Once again, the artist is toying with our imagination and our fantasy – he leads us onto our own inner paths.
There is a similarity between Åkesson’s suggestive imagery and the world of film. As an example, the acclaimed film director Lars von Trier is often criticized for what is perceived as manipulation in his dramatization and portrayal of his characters. We are made to feel Selma’s anguish in the film Dancer in the Dark. We suffer with Bess as she sacrifices herself in Breaking the Waves. In Melancholia we follow Justine’s mental escape into the terrible but sobering landscape of depression. Melancholia is moreover a film with an aesthetic closely related to the visual world of Markus Åkesson.The film offers direct references to the work of the Pre-Raphaelites – a style of painting from the mid 19th century where classical motives of beauty and death engendered a spiritual approach to the physical world, which wanted to break free from the rigidly academic art practiced by the group’s contemporaries.
SPIRITUAL TRACES IN PATTERN AND FORM
Who were the Pre-Raphaelites? The three artists John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in England in 1848. The somewhat convoluted name is derived from the Renaissance painter Raphael. Millais, Hunt and Rossetti wanted to return to the spirit of art that existed before Raphael and Michelangelo, a spirit they perceived to be present in Italian 15th century painting in particular. The Pre-Raphaelites revelled in details and the close study of lush nature, but a strong social awareness was also ingrained in their work. The core group came to consist of seven artists, but many more worked in the same vein. In Markus Åkesson’s paintings, we find both the richness in detail and the meditation over existential questions and conditions. Dead, and often taxidermied animals seem to find themselves in the wrong place, such as a living room. These images capture our gaze and lock us into an almost meditative state. But the motive itself is not caught in stillness. There is frozen movement, both in the depiction of the embalmed or recently killed animal, and in the portrayal of a child’s gaze.
In many of Markus Åkesson’s paintings, symbols reoccur in different forms, sometimes as the dominating subject in the foreground, at other points as one of many objects that together tell a fraught tale of life, death and afterlife. Focusing on the afterlife we briefly return to the painting in the series Psychopomp Club. What does “Psychopomp Club” mean? Searching for the word “psychopomp” leads us back to the world of mythology and to the transitional land between life and death. A psychopomp is a guide – a spirit, god, demon or angel – who in the mythology of most religions acts as a guiding spirit as someone recently deceased journeys on to the next world. In Psychopomp Club the concept of death is introduced both through the previously mentioned model of a brain, and in the hen skeleton. The dead bird reoccurs in other paintings from 2014 for example in The Room of Life and Death (here depicted as a fleeing taxidermied pheasant) and also the medical, more stylistic model of a human heart. Birds die quickly. A swift stretching of the bird’s neck ends its life. A bird’s skeleton is light, easy to crush, light – to allow flight in life. Perhaps that is the reason why birds are so often depicted in relation to death? One of the gods that Markus Åkesson often refers to is the
Egyptian god Thot. The psychopomp Thot takes the shape of a man with an ibis head. He is the record keeper when the hearts of the dead are being weighed. About eight million ibis birds were mummified in Egypt in Thot’s honor between 1100 B.C. and 30 B.C. In Åkesson’s paintings we find the ibis skeleton in The Room of Life and Death, Beauty and Ibis Skull among other pictures.
But let us now return to the painting Sleeping Beauty.
Interestingly enough, the motif depicted in the painting was partially commissioned, the school had asked for a dark wood. Markus Åkesson comes from Småland. His studio lies in a small community called Nybro. Nybro is surrounded by forest. As a place, it is in many ways the epitome of Småland. The Swedish architectural standards that characterize the streets, the small local shops and services and the traffic leading to the larger towns of Växjö and Kalmar. The Glass Kingdom with its glassworks, the remains of its industrial architecture, stately and majestic “working man’s palaces” waiting for tourists to come and visit. Beyond it all stands the forest, vast and boundless, the flat landscape making it impossible to pinpoint a horizon. There is a tightness in Markus Åkesson’s paintings. The subject is close and rich in detail. It is as though the gaze or a camera has stopped, fascinated by a certain pattern, or by the light hitting and highlighting a particular part of a body: a neck, a finger, the shiny tip of a nose, a blushing cheek. Sleeping Beauty is large, but even in this painting only an excision of the foot of the forest is portrayed; the knotted roots, dry sticks and moss clad stones. Even among the stones and the bodies a pattern emerges and the waiting, resting people will merge into one entity.
Joanna Sandell
Art Gallery Manager, Liljevalch´s Art Gallery, Stockholm