Stieg Persson: Polyphonic

Stieg Persson’s paintings are an intricate puzzle of suggestions and contradictions, belief and dissent, hope and disapproval. They defy summarization, not to be clever, but because things are complicated. He combines the disparate elements of experience and turns them into something irresistibly beautiful. Objectively his work functions as an investigation of history, philosophy and theory, and yet is overwhelmingly intimate. It is a fine balance of the Renaissance and David Lynch, of Death Metal and Milton; it is purity and it is perversion . . . The meaning of Persson’s work and the manner and materials with which it has been made are inextricably linked; each element supports and complements the others, skilfully generating an overall tumbling harmony of meaning.[1]

The dark, largely monochromatic imagery that Stieg Persson produced during the early 1980s not long after graduation from art school was to set the young artist on a stellar trajectory which saw his work included in international exhibitions such as The Australians: Three Generations of Drawing in New York in 1984 (and the acquisition of his work by the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the age of twenty-four) and high-profile Australian contexts such as Australian Perspecta in 1985 and The Australian Bicentennial Perspecta of 1988. Created in Persson’s bedroom during a period of illness when he was without a studio or employment, and had very little money, the unstretched and unprimed canvases were born of necessity—rolled out on the floor and produced in a limited space with materials he had to hand.[2]

Employing bold, graphic black-and-white images drawn from sources ranging from Renaissance art to Chinese propaganda and early twentieth-century stamps, and overlaying these on a landscape background, Persson was able to introduce a number of different concerns within a single work. In allowing loaded images to circulate and float on a painting’s surface, however, Persson also ensured that their roles as political and cultural signifiers were frustrated and denied, and that multiple, shifting interpretations of his work was the only possible outcome.[3] As the artist said at the time: “I wanted the landscape to act as a backdrop for events to occur on,” for [my] paintings to be “like theatrical sets where dramatic scenes take place.”[4]

Even at this initial stage of his career, Persson’s interest in what he has referred to as the “almost communication” of painting manifested in a combination of imagery traversing markers of time, culture, class and taste that thwarted any form of narrative-based reading,[5] and equally displayed the artist’s characteristic unwillingness to declare a position or stance on either his source material or his wider practice. Persson’s work of the early 1980s also established his singular ability to collapse and joyfully confound our desire to understand and experience time and art history in clearly delineated periods, an attribute that has continued to weave through and inform his oeuvre. With sumptuous imagery seemingly at odds with the allusive and elusive titles that might both frame and explain it, Persson’s exquisitely crafted paintings please and tease the eye and mind, deftly combining the artist’s acute observations of western culture and its obsessions with his extensive art-historical knowledge:

There’s tremendous joy in unravelling both the formal qualities and the content aspects of Persson’s work. It is work that rewards contemplation while exercising the eyes. It is art that captures the character of its time while expressing its own historical relevance. You can surrender yourself to the dynamic aspects of its appearance and you can find intellectual pathways through the gravitational fields that hold the molecular elements of its construction in place. Much work aspires to such sensorial enrichment but very little of it achieves it in the way that Persson’s does.[6]

In a strategy already employed by modernists before him, Persson’s conscious removal of colour from his palette at this time provided a much-needed sense of clarity and direction. Driven by a questioning of the contribution of art, and especially painting, to contemporary life, this restriction enabled the artist to investigate the possibilities of blackness and the technical limits of creating active and passive space on canvas, while continuing to foreground and challenge painting’s two-dimensionality (all the more evident when monochrome and largely abstract). With the depth, complexity, and often the variety of media that comprise their seemingly monochrome surfaces, Persson’s atmospheric canvases change personality according to the light in which they are experienced, and reward physical engagement and extended viewing. While Persson’s intelligent construction of his imagery is intended to initially beguile and attract the viewer—“[a]rtworks can be clever or insightful or provocative or powerful but beauty is the comparative advantage that art should have over other aspects of life”[7]—he has always expected his audiences to work.

Immediately calling to mind the darker symbolic associations of black—melancholy, depression’s ‘Black Dog’, mystery, fear, the unknown and, of course, death; and created at the height of postmodernism with its own ‘deaths’ (‘the death of the author’, ‘the death of painting’)—works such as Painting 1986, 1986 and Painting 1987 & men & mirrors loved her, 1988, also capture black’s allure, its association with the romantic and its erotic suggestiveness (just what can happen beneath the ‘cloak of darkness’). Persson achieves this through contrast, painting evocative, atmospheric and almost bodily flourishes of white that seem to emerge from, and hover over, the black expanses of the canvases like ghostly apparitions.[8]

The ironically titled Our Faith: The Case For and Against Colour series of multi-part works from the mid 1980s also conveys the artist’s awareness of the fact that his chosen colour, black, is not a colour at all, but a tone (as J.M.W. Turner said in 1818: “Light is therefore colour, and shadow the privation of it.”[9]). Persson introduced colour into these works through jewel-like figurative details that float weightlessly in the blackness of the smaller panels. By confidently combining colour and blackness, with abstraction, figuration and the decorative, and scroll-like flourishes of white in these works,[10] Persson questioned contemporary art-historical and art-world allegiances, fashion and ‘faith’. He proposes, as Robert Lindsay has noted, “an analogy to the cultural framing of absolute knowledge placed in opposition to belief: chemistry to alchemy, astronomy to astrology, philosophy to sophistry.[11] As the artist commented in an interview in 1987:

When I started doing this work, one of the things that was crucial to me was that if I was going to start painting colour, or oil painting colour then I would have a look around and see what oil paintings can and can’t do . . . It’s still something that is unanswered. . .

It still comes back to the philosophical point of the role of the artist. The role of the visual artist, their ‘contribution to society’, the sort of impossibility of doing paintings, in one sense and yet the seductiveness of doing painting. So when I started constructing the ideas for this I was interested in what oil painting can and can’t do, and one of the things it can do—and do remarkably well—is mimic surface and that mimicking of surface adds the richness to the work which, sometimes, not all the time, almost becomes as important as the supposed content of the work.

I suppose that what I am saying is that really I was interested in reintroducing the notion of the look and the feel of the painting—the physicality of the painting as important as content rather than as secondary to content and this is something that I hadn’t seen in a long time.

 . . . I don’t know whether it’s cowardice on my behalf but . . . painting seems to summarise my stance on the whole thing which is . . . that the ‘case’ for example against colour is neither guilty or not guilty.[12] 

Far from absolute belief, Persson’s faith in painting and, by extension, the role of art and the artist, equivocates—competing doubt and courage continue to serve as a motivating force across his career.[13] Accordingly, the large central canvases in the works from Our Faith both reveal the struggle and labour of their creation and proudly foreground technical competence (almost a taboo at the time) by incorporating torn elements of previous canvases in collages built from past failures. Knowingly using the practice of collage as both an act of redemption and creative inspiration, Persson often flipped these component parts so that the back of an earlier painting becomes the ‘face’ of the new work; or used commanding calligraphic flourishes of white dancing across the work’s surface to tie together the oily gloss of previous canvases with newly applied flat blackboard paint. By bringing together figurative details that recall the vanitas of sixteenth-century Dutch painting with monochrome canvases that nod to Persson’s earlier work and Russian artist Kasimir Malevich’s black square,[14] Our Faith created a circular dialogue around notions of fallibility, the transience of life (and, possibly, art-world success) and the search for perfection.[15]

While Persson now ‘sketches’ or ‘thinks’ in paint on small square canvases (a number of which are included as finished works in this exhibition, and in combination in The Fall, 2004), collage has been both a source of play and experimentation and a tool for ‘working things out’ across his career. The artist’s happening upon a stash of old X-rays in the late 1980s (now almost inconceivable in our highly-regulated twenty-first century)[16] encouraged him to continue to explore the possibilities of collage in a new medium. The resulting works further extend the dark associations of the vanitas, eliciting powerful, immediate affinities with sickness and mortality. Made by overlapping these ‘found’ X-ray films and rephotographing them, works such as Untitled, 1988, create and present improbable anatomies and unrecognisable conditions. Their transparency still provides access to the ‘interior’, but Persson reframes the represented body as an essentially abstract form that encourages interpretation while steadfastly resisting diagnosis. And, as Christopher Chapman has noted, the sense of hidden meaning created within these works is also heightened by Persson’s coating of the surface of these images with a mixture of beeswax and lavender oil, producing a deep, soft texture and mysterious scent.[17]

X-rays reveal the body’s interior while the body itself disappears, a quality that reflects Persson’s desire to blur boundaries between fact and fiction, image and truth in these works. This also plays out in canvases from this period that extend from, and corrupt, Malevich’s perfect black square, bringing forth painting’s ‘bodily support’ (the stretcher) by rubbing into and removing the painting’s black ground, and resulting in what Persson has referred to as a kind of “diseased minimalism”.[18] X-rays convey information in a visual language that can be learnt and read, and which carries meaning that can, at its most effective, help cheat or delay death. However, like the artist’s subsequent work with indecipherable text (see Judgement of Paris, 2007, for example) Persson’s deliberate messing with the subtle tonal range of the X-ray in these collages and related paintings ultimately turns interpretation on its head:

Persson has long been fascinated by the conceptual and stylistic possibilities of opposing forces. Typically, they appear in a collision of ‘antithetical’ styles, the language of modernism—abstraction, reductivism, self-referentiality and collage—used in contrast to that of narrative and illusionism. Here these familiar counteractive forces reappear in a new conceptual framework structured by using the metaphor of cancer. In a most disturbing process, the meanings of this body of work are undermined by sources in its own history, just as the healthy physical body is invaded by disease.[19]

The artist’s interest in the limits and capacity of the human body and spirit when faced with illness, and his sensitive and poetic realisation of the impact of disease, led to his being invited to participate in a four-month residency in the Oncology Department of Melbourne’s Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in January 1989. The first artist to take part in this new initiative, developed by the hospital’s curator and art advisor Katrina Rumley, Persson bore responsibility for setting the parameters and, ultimately, the tone of this well-meaning venture, which “hoped that in representing life in a cancer ward through their work, artists would contribute to breaking down the barriers that surround illness and in particular the stigma that a diagnosis of cancer often creates.”[20] Difficult and confronting for a young man interested in these concerns but with little lived experience of disease and death,[21] this residency inspired his series of paintings from 1989–90 based on English poet John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Seuerall Steps in my Sicknes of 1624.

Written in late 1623 after a period of extreme illness which brought the poet close to death, Donne’s Devotions charts the twenty-three days of his sickness and eventual recovery, with each section (which is again broken into three subsections, comprising a ‘meditation’, an ‘expostulation' and a prayer) expressing the thoughts, anxieties, fears and questions of faith that Donne faced each day as the ‘disease’ progressed and finally abated. This clearly resonated in terms of subject matter and concerns around the ‘higher’ pursuit of art, as Persson observed: “My interest in him [Donne] started when I realised that the role of painting and its cultural importance is somewhat similar to poetry; no one would deny the world is a better place for having poetry, but who reads it?”[22] For Persson, the chronological narrative of Donne’s prose poem also provided a readymade structure for his own work, a deliberate limitation recalling the earlier restriction of his palette to black.

Conscious of the manner in which his use of the work of a seventeenth-century poet becomes, in turn, part of an historical lineage of paintings based on literary subjects, while also reflecting (but not adopting) postmodern forms of quotation,[23] Persson titled his paintings after John Donne’s Devotions, and numbered them sequentially in accordance with the poem and the telling of Donne’s journey from sickness to health. However, at this point any connection between the individual paintings of the series ends. Starting each time with a completely black canvas, Persson allowed himself to ‘riff’ on the collective content of the poems. Their metaphoric power is captured by his accomplished use of sfumato and creation of vaporous, plume-like forms, as well as by the improvisatory nature of the works’ making:

For me, the Donne thing was finding a structure which would allow me to freeform—to move out of the restrictions I had created around making painting… I needed to bust out. What I had in my mind was ‘I want to paint a Baroque painting. How do I do it?’ And eventually, I got there”.[24]

Interestingly, Persson never finished the intended twenty-four canvases of the series, but stopped at number sixteen, when Donne begins to recuperate (“I just wasn’t good at redemption”[25]). He did, however, paint the final panel, number twenty-four—a black square.

§

Preoccupations and concerns around mortality and the human condition, the ongoing relevance and importance of the past, and the ebb and flow of notions of taste and class thread through and bind Persson’s expansive practice. Yet when his different bodies of work from the last three decades are brought together, they differ dramatically in style—it is almost as if they have been created by a number of different artists moonlighting as Stieg Persson. Never one to rest on his laurels, Persson’s impetus is to expose and in turn blur art-historical categories and taste so as to scrutinise and assess his own practice. His love of the Rococo and its playful incorporation in his work is a perfect case in point, for within his oeuvre it functions as a powerful signifier of ‘the decorative’ and, by contemporary association, ‘bad’ taste:

Rococo’s syncretic essence signifies a modernity, a sophistication in keeping with the finest of Enlightenment values yet this is the same style that was and to some degree still is branded as frivolous, trivial, affected, pretty, effeminate and associated with aristocratic depravity, libertine indolence and painterly artifice.[26] 

Persson recognises when things have become too easy, and understands that as an artist he too is subject to the vagaries of fashion and aesthetic judgement.[27]

§

In the early 1990s, Persson moved—much to the shock of many at the time—as far as possible from his ‘signature’ black canvases. Unlike the elegant, evocative and undeniably Romantic paintings that preceded them, this new body of collages and paintings appeared jarring, garish and deliberately awkward by comparison. Most horrifyingly, these works were green. While calling to mind associations with nature, Spring, and notions of renewal, green has historically been a temperamental and recalcitrant pigment for artists, and is rarely given such visual and spatial prominence in painting. As Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky claimed: “Absolute green . . . is the most anesthetising colour possible . . . similar to a fat cow, full of good health, lying down, rooted, capable only of ruminating and contemplating the world through its stupid inexpressive eyes.”[28] In order to break with what was by now a well-known, well-trodden (and by all accounts successful) path, Persson landed on green, again creating a conceptual and formal framework that enabled him to move forward without having to reconsider and reconceive every variable of a new work every time.

The chance and discovery that underpin the act of collage propelled this series forward and was carried into the paintings. This enabled Persson to both explore and revel in his love of text (manifest in the antique-style typography of Painting, 1993—Formal Invitation, 1993, for example), ‘low grade’ decorative sources such as wallpaper, and the surprising outcomes presented by the juxtaposition of different elements within the work. Collages such as Collage 1993—Sept 12, 1993, also introduce figuration, specifically the female body, into Persson’s work, though this classical and idealised form of beauty is truncated and rendered in sickly green, as if seen in the photographic ‘reverse’ of a colour transparency. Indeed if printed as such, these paintings would be red.

The perversity of this change of direction is equally reflected in the wry humour brought to the works’ titles—often the names of European racehorses who failed on Australian tracks. Aligning the perils of an artistic life and, no doubt, his own career, with the horses’ short-lived triumphs and ultimate fate of being ‘put out to pasture’—or, indeed, much worse—Persson defied the art world’s desire for stylistic continuity, and how this assists, and is reflected in, commercial success.[29] Indeed, such a strategy, which breaks the pressure and anxiety around creating ‘new’ work, is the force behind Stieg Persson’s polyphonic oeuvre; it provides a conceptual framework and painterly challenge that moves the artist beyond his technical ability and ease of mimesis, and motivates the deviations and intersections of his practice.

§

The body of work that followed Persson’s ‘green period’ reached an equally surprising juncture: returning the artist to ‘blackness’, but through the dark heart of Norwegian Death Metal. Inspired by a chance encounter in a newsagency when Persson picked up a Death Metal magazine, it was further encouraged by his subsequent residency in 1996 in Gothenburg, Sweden, which he soon learnt was the home of a major Death Metal scene. Persson began a new series of portraits of Death Metal musicians—many of whom were known, and venerated by fans, for their espousal of hatred and violence and extreme neo-nationalist views. Indeed, Varg Vikernes of Burzum, the subject of Untitled, 1996–97, from The Gothenburg Crosses series, committed one of Norway’s most notorious murders of the 1990s, killing Mayhem guitarist Euronymous (Øystein Aarseth), proprietor of the Deathlike Silence record label and the record store Helvete (Hell), and leader of the Death Metal cabal the Black Circle. On his arrest, it was learnt that Vikernes had also planned to blow up Nidaros Domkirke, Scandinavia’s largest medieval cathedral, dated to the eleventh century, which perhaps goes part way to explaining why the stained-glass sections of Persson’s painting Domkyrka, 1998, are dotted, rather uncannily, with ever-watching eyes. Vikernes was not the only perpetrator. In the few years prior to Perrson’s arrival in Gothenburg to undertake his residency, eight members of the Norwegian Black Metal scene had served prison sentences for various crimes.[30]

Stieg Persson has absolutely no interest in Death Metal music or the shadowy machinations of its various players. However, its marginalised, ‘outsider’ status, its subcultural power and particularly the different bands’ attraction to and appropriation of ‘high art’ sources such as the work of Hieronymous Bosch, Matthias Grüenwald, Gustave Dore and nineteenth-century academicians, did resonate. As Persson explained:

To my surprise I began to develop an interest in these images, partly through what is a glorious denial of restraint and partly because the sources of much of these images appeared to relate to the images of Nineteenth Century Academic painting, an area I had an interest in for some time. These images were ‘read’ by the students [at the outer-eastern-suburbs TAFE where Persson was teaching at the time] as being subversive and radical, and yet the source material was generally conservative, academic and traditional. The lineage of the visual material used by the Death Metal bands and culture can be traced through Fantastic Art and Gothic literature, to artists such as Gustave Dore and popularist illustrative artists, and the apparent simplistic ideology linked to more complex nationalist and cultural ideologies.[31]

The repurposing of text and symbols for Death Metal band logos, album covers and merchandise, recombined and distorted to the point where they are able to be read only by the ‘initiated’, also appealed, and is echoed in the destruction of Persson’s own work and its recombination, via collage, into new visual ‘mash-ups’ that hint at meaning but confound interpretation.[32] However, despite their bastardised form, the inclusion of easily recognisable symbols such as the swastika and pentagram charge these paintings with a sense of revulsion that sits in opposition to the beautiful (almost tenderly) painted portraits of the scene’s young men.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the works that resulted from Persson’s residency—The Gothenburg Crosses series—created some controversy when he returned to Sweden to show the work in 1998, as the artist had juxtaposed images of the Gothenburg’s musical underbelly with the green heraldic shapes of the city’s different municipalities and the red rose of the country’s Social Democratic Party, all clearly identifiable (and confronting) to a local audience.[33] As David O’Halloran has noted:

Persson brings together the icons of city and state, alongside the iconography of those the state and the city are least proud, Sweden’s Heavy Metal bands and fans. That the ordered utopia of the Swedish state, with its high taxes delivering extraordinary levels of social welfare services and middle-class unity, should produce kids with such mordant interests is an irony of no small interest to Persson. Respectable society tries to repress chaos—Metal makes it happen.[34]

§

After these distinct bodies of work, which function powerfully as documents of particular times and places (both in terms of the artist’s career and society more broadly) with all of the inherent risks of nostalgia versus ongoing relevance, Persson’s paintings, for a time, were no longer conceived in series. Instead, the works from the late 1990s to 2000s exist much more singularly, willingly embodying—in their use of text, the arabesque, and their joyful embrace of Rococo-like elements—the interconnected yet untethered properties of the artist’s interests and influences. Persson’s fascination with and love for the excesses of Rococo (seen for example, in a painting such as Voyage dans le pays ‘You Beaut’, 2004), plays out in the seeming ‘weightlessness’ of forms that cheekily defy the forces of gravity and, like their ostentatious and much-derided source, continue to stretch and challenge notions of class and taste. Even when the artist’s continuing investigation of ‘the decorative’ as “a descriptor of the functionality of painting—to decorate”[35] resulted in endlessly seductive works such as Middle Management, 2003, and Green Field Opportunities, 2005, the temptation of falling into the trap of production-line creation for commercial and critical success is stopped short. While such an outcome might be appealing personally and welcome financially, it is not Persson’s driving force. His paintings may be about ‘the decorative’, but they are not decoration, and while they are, at times, exquisitely beautiful, this is not the end game. Persson continues to wrangle and struggle with just what it means to be an artist; with the challenges of creating ‘new’ work, and with the ability of painting to function as an effective form of communication in contemporary life. In our image- and information-saturated world, is it not perverse to think that this centuries-long craft can continue to contribute and, importantly, have something to say? Yet it is in the ‘slow time’ created by Persson’s images—in the spaces of contemplation that they open up for the viewer and the tussle created between their often sardonic titles and imagery—that their power resides. Given the artist’s knowledge of the demographics of the ‘typical’ museum- or gallery-going visitor, Persson’s works knowingly point the finger; implicating us, the largely middle-class consumers of art (as leisure, as spectacle) as part of the problem of neoliberal politics and its impact on contemporary society. Indeed, when given the time they demand, Stieg Persson’s luscious images come with a sting. 

The political dimension of Persson’s painting reached new heights around 2006 in the work brought together in the artist’s exhibition History Painting at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. Perhaps it came with maturity, an increasing sense of anger and frustration, or simply no longer giving a f***, but the paintings in this exhibition clearly expressed Persson’s outrage and horror at the state of contemporary Australian politics and its “comfortable and relaxed” aspirations (The Fourth Howard Ministry Wishes you a Very Biedermeier Christmas, 2006).[36] Bringing together stylistically diverse imagery such as the artist’s majestic scroll paintings, works of the ilk of Untitled, 2006, whose ribbon-like furls are filled with the “middle-class anxieties—sexual deficiencies and sure-fire wealth strategies” of electronic spam,[37] and various abstract paintings playing with patterning and decoration, the exhibition embodied Persson’s idiosyncratic and complex oeuvre, and signalled the different concerns that would circulate and intersect in later works.

While the artist’s interest in death and mortality reverberated in works such as Frenched, 2007, with its lively dance of dry bones shimmying across the work’s surface, the exhibition’s namesake image, History Painting, 2006, referred to and echoed the genre’s representation of grand narratives and its role as a form of documentation, while squarely placing itself in the realm of contemporary politics through the inclusion of a crumpled piece of newspaper at the heart of the bold cross that emblazons the work. The details of this delicate still life reveal a tribute to Van Nguyen Tuong Van (under his baptismal name Nguyen Caleb Van), an Australian citizen who was hanged in Singapore in December 2005 for drug trafficking. Ironically, this small marker of Van Tuong Nguyen’s passing appears in the newspaper alongside a notice for Justice Marks, a member of the Victorian judiciary who campaigned for human rights.[38] Through the quiet yet insistent inclusion of this found object—which reveals itself only through close looking—Persson’s painting becomes a poignant cry for restraint and clemency and for recognition of, and respect for, the value of human life. Abstract works referred to colloquially as the artist’s ‘flower paintings’ were also exhibited. The series included works such as Northern Blight, 2007–08, with resin-soaked, glutinous surfaces, and titles that ranged from references to patented genes (LibertyLink®, 2006) and genetically modified crops (InVigor®, 2005—a type of canola) to major players in the financial sector (such as economist and company director Saul Eslake, 2006 and Chip Goodyear, 2005, former CEO of BHP Billiton). These works are far from pretty, but instead deliberately repulse; affecting the viewer bodily with their metastasising surfaces and awkward and perverse palette. From the perspective of these works—with their references to sickness and medical and scientific interventions and their relationship to profit, along with their resemblance to virulent pathogens viewed under a microscope (see Clash Theory, 2006–08 for example)—it is difficult to see any sense of hope or redemption in Persson’s worldview. 

§

It was time to lighten up. Stieg Persson’s response to the oft-heard refrain, ‘why don’t you paint something nice?’ or ‘why are your paintings so dark?’, was to give viewers what they demanded. He dramatically shifted his characteristic palette of blacks, browns and umbers to iridescent white, brandished with gold. And to perversely fill the canvas, in works such as Philosophy of Individualism with Goji Berries, 2012–13, with the cutest subjects imaginable—a veritable tableau of fluffy baby animals which are at once irresistibly cute, undeniably kitsch and somehow, when rendered in paint and the central focus of the work, strangely repulsive. As the artist said of this series in 2014 when it was first shown in an exhibition titled The Fragonard Room:

Everyone loves fluffy kittens and bunnies. There’s nothing to understand, it’s a gut response. You are drawn into a judgment based on taste. And the exercising of taste is one of the most potentially shameful and exposing things the middle class can do and, as it happens, this anxiety is at the very core of art and art collecting.[39]

Drawing once again on the notions of taste and class surrounding the Rococo by aligning his own work with the movement’s major proponents (or ‘confectioners’, depending on your aesthetic response), such as Boucher, Fragonard and Watteau, Persson knowingly turns on his own supporter base in these works; suspending the goji berry—as a signifier of middle-class aspirational gastronomic ‘taste’—and other high-end foodstuffs in Rococo-esque gravity-defying style from the gold scaffolds of tagging that adorn the work’s surface.[40] Ironically, this ‘base level’ form of graffiti—far from the council-endorsed street art of Melbourne’s Hosier Lane or the international acclaim of Britain’s Banksy—was sourced from the artist’s own neighbourhood in the upper middle-class suburb of Brighton, in Melbourne’s bayside.[41] Located in the carparks and laneways of the area’s high-end retail strip (from which the artist directly draws the blackboard signs of subsequent works such as Poussins and Grapes, 2015), the tagging Persson employs is Rococo in style; a contemporary version of “the ornamentation of a previous class associated with aristocracy and decadence”,[42] and representative, for him, of the dark side of neoliberal subjectivity—indulgent, selfish and narcissistic.[43][ii]

In Persson’s most recent paintings, direct copies of hand-drawn shop signs from Brighton’s high streets float like eighteenth-century rocaille against a backdrop of shimmering tags.[44] Lo-fi calls to action by the suburb’s various traders, these offerings serve to create anxiety around what we aren’t, but can become—‘Spring clean your skin’, ‘JEWELLERY FASHION ACCESSORIES LIFESTYLE’ and what we should be and do, and what we should consume, particularly in the kitchen—‘BLACK RICE’ ‘SUPERFOOD SALAD’, ‘Delicious, raw, vegan + gluten free Organic sweet treats’, ‘YAKITORI BUTTERFLIED EYE FILLET’. Bringing his sharp eye and acerbic wit to these moments of modern consumption,[45] Persson is particularly interested in the manner in which the sourcing, cooking, plating and enjoyment of food is now the preeminent arena of aesthetic discernment and, by extension, social distinction. Yet this is a shared existence and Persson speaks from within, for the artist is well-known as a great cook, has had his fair share of ‘fine dining’ experiences, and has even created a dinner service for celebrity chef Shannon Bennett. Given Persson’s ongoing investigation of the relevance and contribution of art in contemporary society, and his particular interest in the role of the artist, it seems only fair that he would both size up and take on the competition:

It is my contention that food or more particularly “foodism” is the dominant cultural expression of our age. Its seemingly ubiquitous presence in the social order now requires the depth of knowledge and connoisseurship once reserved for the arts. It is an expectation that the educated twenty-first-century neoliberal citizen has an opinion on what they are ingesting, its comparative merits and failings, be that it in its ingredients, its cooking or its presentation, even if it’s just their morning coffee. Amongst the new expanding middle class it is now the preeminent arena of aesthetic discrimination and of social distinction. Food is far from class neutral. Numerous sociological studies on diet indicate the same patterns. The impoverished eat poorly because of the lack of choice and education, as well as low income. Lifestyle television cooking shows such as Jamie’s Money Saving Meals, whilst honestly motivated, are preaching to a middle-class audience who can not only afford a bottle of passata sitting around in the pantry but also know what it is. And at the other end of the scale you have the spectacle of the upwardly mobile fretting about the impossible task of cooking a dinner party that rivals the food from Vue du Monde or Attica.[46]

Painting may find it difficult to compete for space in our increasingly screen-based and worthy–busy lives, but those of us who take the time to stop and look, and to allow Stieg Persson’s paintings to work on us, will ultimately be rewarded. It may not often be a comfortable experience, but that’s exactly the point. Far from didactic and providing no answers, Persson’s paintings are beautiful and, at times, deliberately perverse provocations that encourage us to think, reflect and—who knows—even re-assess. As we recognise aspects of ourselves, our lives, and our anxieties and aspirations in their luscious imagery, we are both confronted and bewitched by the truth of their wry humour and astute, beautifully packaged observations. To see and understand Persson’s painting is to be caught in a seductive feedback loop that is at once accusatory and strangely seductive.

46 Stieg Persson, unpublished PhD Confirmation paper pp. 15–16.