Tomas Colbengtson's art – images, objects, sculptures, installations – places us as viewers, as eyewitnesses, on a fragile ark, a vessel that has arrived at the crossroads of the present, where pasts and futures intertwine.
We are allowed, urged, compelled to witness how the art brings together – and thereby reshapes, transforms – times, places, landscapes, beings, faces, souls, worlds. Here, even the materials themselves bear witness, speak and tell stories.
The glass that preserves and makes inaccessible, protects and exposes, encloses and displays. The glass that gently encapsulates and presents images, like archaeological finds in secure storage, while at the same time, through reflection or transparency, incorporates the surroundings and the wider world.
The photograph, imprisoned, locked into its unyielding eternal present, stubbornly insisting on its monosyllabic, silent – yet bottomless – modus operandi: to show presence through absence, to preserve by ceasing, to reveal life by, through a rift in time, seeking those who have passed on. A kind of freezing fire operates within every photograph, every image, throughout all of Tomas Colbengtson's art.
Here, time is always layered, always provisional, unresolved. Just as places are negotiable, ambiguous, carriers of many stories. The landscapes, one stratum upon another, overlapping layers, relentlessly pierced by one another. The people, the faces, the souls – discreet and transient, yet struck, fragile, volatile, and yet unwavering despite their vulnerability, wounded and simultaneously resurrected; the art repairs, restores, reclaims but also reshapes, reveals and recreates.