The odd, disconcerting quality of his paintings, the puzzling clumsiness of his in fact extremely well-executed drawing, remove Dick Bengtsson’s work from the sphere of solid provincialism where superficially they seem to belong. At the same time their traditional look excludes them from the ranks of the avant-garde. It is only now, with this carefully chosen retrospective, that Bengtsson, who has exhibited works of this kind for twenty years, has become something more than an artist’s artist.
A field, a stone wall, a church among trees—these emblems, in the Swedish tradition of “honest,” intimate painting, convey a sense of security and Nordic melancholy. Or so it would seem, but for another emblem in the lower left corner of the canvas—a swastika. In this work from the late ’60s, Landskap med kyrka (Landscape with church), Bengtsson confronts us with a dilemma whose only “solution” appears to be an insight into the fundamental unreadability of signs. The viewer’s interpretation is forced to oscillate between the rhetorical formulas of propaganda and a more literal reading, between the suggestion of the “authoritarian church” and a short circuit in which the picture’s emblems confirm the total difference in essence obtaining between them.
In the prism of a Bengtsson painting a large facet reflects an indomitable will to explore the fabric of fascism. But the painter is not content merely to stab into it with his palette knife; his distrust of language forces him to go a step further and attack the authoritarian demand for meaning. This he does within the domain where this demand has always been most urgent—that of allegory. Bengtsson has an unerring flair for appropriating the pictures and styles that suit his purpose best, whether publicity photos from South Africa, popular comic strips, or paintings by Lucas Cranach, Edward Hopper, or Clyfford Still. The landscapes too always seem emblematic of a style—they are pictures of pictures. The distance between sign and signified is enormous.
In order to close the paintings still more, Bengtsson patines them according to an approved forger’s formula. They become “timeless,” seeming to lose touch both with the artist who painted them and with the age that might supply interpretive keys. With their opacity, and their aura at once enticing and disturbing, they are reminiscent of Troy Brauntuch’s works, in which the mirroring glass assumes the role of Bengtsson’s patina.
Often Bengtsson draws on emblems laden with meaning within art. In Bergsvandrare (Mountaineers), 1974, for example, three healthy Wandervögeln in a mountain landscape reminiscent of Germany are painted in a manner recalling the artistic ideals of the Third Reich. Unappealing, perhaps, but it would seem unproblematic; then one notices the rucksacks, which are painted in the style of three Modernist painters—Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, and perhaps Wols. It is as though one were once more faced with Landskap med kyrka—though that painting is here turned inside out. The philistine landscape painting in Bergsvandrare serves as the emblem of fascism, while the Modernist paintings take on the role of the “honest Swedish landscape” in the earlier painting—in another allegory of unreadability.
—Lars Nittve
Translated from the Swedish by Lars-Håkan Svensson.
