The urban landscape paintings of Thomas Nyqvist have always made a great impression on me. His subjects are often almost banal: construction site huts, electricity pylons, bridge underpasses, industrial areas, dilapidated houses. These are presented almost without exception in night lighting or in thick fog. Many of the constructions in Nyqvist’s paintings are the type that in reality are covered in graffiti. This tells something about the nature of the milieus that he portrays. Despite all this, something very refined and traditional can be sensed in Nyqvist’s paintings. In part this is due to his precise and skilful brushstrokes and his select use of a few “graphic” colours. At the same time his paintings remind one of the works displayed in the spacious halls of European art museums. Still, it is difficult to get a precise grip on what his art is about. Nyqvist does not borrow from or comment on old western art with a postmodern ironic touch; instead, it seems to be a much more complex relationship. Perhaps it is even so that everything is connected by something that I simply do not immediately understand?
SHADOWS OF THE NIGHT
Around the turn of the millennium Nyqvist created a series of paintings that he entitled simply Night Scene (1999–2003). All of the paintings in this series are variations on the same nocturnal theme. The most impressive of these paintings are on canvases over three metres wide. When viewing Nyqvist’s paintings, the viewer is more aware than usual of his or her own physical relationship to them, as the paintings are almost without exception either very large or very small. The large paintings force the viewer to become a captive of their themes; the small paintings in turn force the viewer to reach out in order to examine them. This makes gallery visitors instantly vigilant to what they are seeing. Standing in front of a large painting from the Night Scene series, the viewer stops as if facing the actual scene presented in the painting. In the cold winter’s night of Night Scene, the viewer is stopped by a strange, even threatening, sight. A large rectangular prism is lying on the ground next to trees that curve above it. A streetlamp somewhere off to the left illuminates the tree’s frozen branches in a ghostly way, yet the massive monolith itself remains mostly in the shadow. The form resting at its base is lonely and withdrawn. It is this silent presence in the dark and icy square that has stopped the viewer/experiencer in this place. At night, clear shapes and distances are usually obscured and distorted, but in the brilliant light of the streetlamp the contrast between light and shadow is only emphasised. These kinds of monolithic sculptures were created especially by American minimalists in the 1960s. The black or metallic prisms of Tony Smith and Robert Morris have been referred to as “quasi subjects” (quasi-sujet in French), as their human dimensions suggested a kind of human presence in spite of their abstract appearances. Although the prism in the Night Scene paintings also has a silent presence, its prone form suggests a tombstone or sarcophagus rather than a standing being. The idea of a tombstone or sarcophagus was present already in the sculptures of the American minimalists, as Tony Smith himself once revealed. Similarly, the dark and threatening nature of the night were in his mind when he created his early Black Box work in the early 1960s. Indeed, French art critic Georges Didi-Hubermann describes the enclosed prisms of Smith and Morris as “silent as a grave”. The dark object lying on the ground in Night Scene does not, however, refer to death or graves in any direct sense, it only suggests something in that direction. One gets the feeling that something is enclosed or hidden inside the object, creating vague feelings of sadness and melancholy. Similarly, this surprising nocturnal scene is somewhat oppressive and menacing. The entire scene is one of a disturbing strangeness, which Sigmund Freud would have referred to as Unheimlich.
It is possible, of course, that I am exaggerating the sense of strangeness in Night Scenes. Art critics at the time described the object as a container by a construction site. I could continue this train of thought and further clarify the realism. In fact, the paintings are based on a weightlifting area in the southwest corner of the Hietaniemi swimming beach in Helsinki. The weightlifting platforms can be seen under the snow in the left edge of the paintings. Next to them is a standard-sized (6 x 3 x 2.6 m) portable barracks building – Nyqvist simply left out the windows and doors. Behind the rock to the left, the high granite wall of Hietaniemi Cemetery can be seen. When standing in this position, if you turn just slightly more to the left, you can see the monumental cross above the military graves in the cemetery. The location then is between the swimming beach and the cemetery – on the border between life and death, so to speak. Note how we encounter the theme of death even when viewing Night Scenes from this perspective. Several art critics have pointed out the remarkable similarity between the composition of the Night Scenes paintings, with their trees and box-like prism, and that of Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego (1635–1636, Louvre, Paris), in which three shepherds and a woman have stopped by the side of a box-like tomb. The meaning of the cryptic Latin text (literally “And in Arcadia I”) that is inscribed on the front of the tomb, with its references to death, has been debated for centuries. Nyqvist himself did not include any references to Et in Arcadia ego, at least not consciously, but the fact that art experts have made the association says something about the mood of Night Scenes.
Some years later, Nyqvist found another similar theme in which the viewer encounters a nocturnal monolith, in this case a large reddish prism with bevelled corners. A menacing shadow is cast on the wall of the prism from the railing of a road bridge above it (Double Reflection, 2006–2007). If there is only a touch of the living presence of “quasi subjects” in these geometrical objects, there is certainly more in the series Kupla and Hemisphere (2001–2003). The bubble domes in these series are strongly reminiscent of organic creatures; it is as if the somewhat asymmetrical bodies are crawling along the ground. As Alien-like creatures, they are more threatening than the monoliths described above. These forms appear only in the flat artificial light of the night, just like almost everything that Nyqvist depicts.
Both Night Scene and the bubble dome paintings were presented in Nyqvist’s small exhibition catalogue published in 2002 and entitled Paikkoja. Platser. Places. Alongside the text is a small black and white photo of the Cenotaph to Sir Isaac Newton designed by French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée in 1784. Strangely, the inclusion of this photo is not explained at all in the catalogue. Presumably, it is meant to reflect the artist’s interests. Now, in 2014, Nyqvists comments that the round shape of the cenotaph refers to the shape of his bubble domes. He reveals that he has always been inspired by so-called French Revolution architecture, the utopian designs of Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, which were indeed meant to remain on the drawing board. Still, the ideas of these late 18th-century painter-architects are closer to Nyqvist than perhaps he even realises. Boullée belongs to a generation for whom the experiences felt by the receiver of the art had become important. He considers how different objects affect people. He speaks continuously of affects, effects and impressions. As with many other of his contemporaries, he was intrigued especially by the idea of sublime experiences. In an unpublished manuscript that he wrote in the late 1780s and entitled Architecture. Essai sur l’art, Boullée describes one of his strongest experiences, which is the key to his architectural designs and, above all, to his cemetery architecture like the Cenotaph to Sir Isaac Newton. He writes about this event right before presenting his cenotaph:
Once when I was in the countryside I was walking in the woods in the
moonlight. My shadow, created by the light, drew my attention (of course,
it was nothing new to me). On account of my peculiar disposition, the effect
of this semblance on me was one of extreme sadness. The shadows of
the trees on the ground made a deep impression on me. This scene grew in
my imagination. I then saw all that was dark in nature. Why so? The mass
of the objects was silhouetted in black against the extremely pale light.
Nature seemed to be offering itself to my eyes in a state of deep mourning.
Does this not seem like a description of the encounter in Nyqvist’s Night Scene paintings?
Chilled by this experience, Boullée writes, he at once gets the idea to apply this to architecture that would be formed entirely based on the impression created by shadows. Specifically winter, with its cold light, lack of colour and grave-like bareness, was the most symbolic season for this kind of cemetery architecture in which he saw brand new professional perspectives opening up for himself. In order to create these kinds of experiences, Boullée designed such sublime monuments and cemeteries that building them would have been completely impossible in reality. In his large-scale watercolours he presented the massive buildings either in moonlight or in pale sunlight shining through thunderclouds. Sharp shadows are also drawn on the side of the Cenotaph to Sir Isaac Newton.
Thomas Nyqvist too is a great architect of shadows, only the moonlight of Boullée has been exchanged for the pallid cold light of Helsinki’s streetlamps. Streetlamps light up the Hietaniemi barracks and bubble domes on a winter’s night in the early 2000s, yet nocturnal shadows follow in Nyqvist’s footsteps a long way. The series Shadowlines from 2006 is the most pronounced example of this. The paintings in this series depict the view from the Jätkäsaari industrial area (since redeveloped) towards the Ruoholahti district and its landmark, the twin smokestacks of the Kellosaari power plant. The buildings, structures and fences create multilevel interwoven shadows on the ground. Nyqvist has used variations of this same moment in several paintings, as well as the interplay of shadows in industrial areas and the remains of former parks in other ways too. His painting Urban Landscape (2005) also features shadows cast on an industrial yard from a fence and poles, but the shapes also include another very strange shadow form. Despite the unclear outlines, it can be identified as a human shadow: the artist himself is depicting this view – a variation of Boullée’s own shadow that so startled him in a moonlit forest a few years prior to the French Revolution. This is a rare autobiographical confession in Nyqvist’s artistic output that is comparable to Boullée’s text.
Boullée and Ledoux also favoured very simple geometrical pieces that served as the basic forms for the buildings they imagined. The prism of the barracks on the Hietaniemi swimming beach is an expression of this spirit, as is the shape of the bubble domes with which Nyqvist refers to the round shape of the Cenotaph to Sir Isaac Newton. Already in his paintings from the 1990s it can be seen that he had found buildings in Helsinki that reflect the clear geometry of French Revolution architecture: the Suvilahti gas bells, Linnanmäki water tower, a semi-cylindrical apartment building in the Kallio district…
The fantasies of Boullée and Ledoux reflected a broader pantheistic philosophy. They viewed the life and death of man as part of the cosmic order in the universe. Universal nature hung in the balance between the depths of the earth and the endless sky. The aesthetic of the sublime were just one way of expressing this. On the other hand, it is quite possible that this aesthetic itself spawned such cosmic ideas. The ideas of vastness and infinity in particular fill the mind with “delightful horror”, which is the best guarantee of a sublime experience according to theoretician Edmund Burke in 1757.
The infinity of the sky makes a powerful impression in Nyqvist’s paintings Isvidd (2003) and Dusk (2004). A steel electricity pylon rising from an islet in the freezing night is like an antenna transmitting seismic and cosmic vibrations. As Boullée himself would say: “Wandering in this immensity, in this extended abyss, man is annihilated by the extraordinary spectacle of inconceivable space.” The bubble dome in the impressively sized oil painting Kupla (2001, 250 x 372 cm) is also suspended between the frozen earth and open sky inpursuit of the cosmically sublime.
Nyqvist is not an 18th-century artist, however. He creates his paintings as large series that are variations on a theme. Expanse of Ice and Dusk are part of a series in which Nyqvist depicts the stretch of water behind the popular recreational island Seurasaari and the power lines that span it from the direction of Hietaniemi and Taivallahti. In the nature of such series, even the smallest variations between paintings assume meaning. By varying slightly his use of colour and brushstrokes, Nyqvist succeeds in transforming the paintings into different modi. As a result, the stretch of water behind Seurasaari sometimes evokes Boullée, yet at other times it is reminiscent of the sparse and foggy seashore view in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea (1809–1810, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin). Indeed, the body of water in both Friedrich’s and Nyqvist’s cases is in fact the same, i.e. the Baltic Sea. According to contemporary and later art critics, the abstract infinity of Friedrich’s sea and sky suggests transcendences that rise above everything worldly. This is no longer the rational pantheism of the Enlightenment as represented by Boullée but rather a pietistic-Protestant experience of the organic connection between everything.
Friedrich’s abstract infinity is so abstract that, when faced by it, the viewer begins to focus not on the sea or sky but rather on the paint surface and brushstrokes. Exactly the same occurs in front of Nyqvist’s paintings, as the endless depth of the sky that curves above the sea is created by multiple thin layers of paint. This technique is reminiscent of pre-Impressionist art. The canvas is tinged with warm ochre, on top of which are several layers of colder-hued glazes through which the ground colour is partially visible. The almost pure white highlights are applied opaquely as clearly defined brushstrokes on top of the other paint layers. I note that this centuries-old technique is one of the main reasons why Nyqvist’s paintings succeed in creating overlapping associations with classical art traditions. When the upper white layer begins to dominate the surface of the painting, the associations switch from Boullée and Friedrich to William Turner’s late-period foggy and semi-abstract landscapes from Venice’s lagoons and England’s rivers. In the paintings in which the sea is depicted in the dark night, the mood is transformed into a dystopian and apocalyptic vision of the future.
The most classic example of a series of variations on a theme in different lighting is Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral, which he painted between 1892 and 1894 from behind the windows of houses opposite the cathedral. Nyqvist, however, certainly was not creating any impressionistic light studies. His paintings are created in the studio using black and white photographs that he takes himself. Nyqvist has commented on his series and the use of photos, saying they provide a certain structural framework within which he is then free to work as he likes. He likens this to how Joseph Albers used repeating nested squares as the basis for his paintings, allowing him to create an almost endless number of fascinating colour studies. Nyqvist often speaks in favour of careful planning in advance. His “Albers-esque” way of thinking reflects his studies at the Free Art School (Vapaa Taidekoulu, Helsinki) in the 1970s.
EMPTY STAGES
Nyqvist often depicts places where there is lots of space and openness. These nocturnal swimming beaches, bubble domes, industrial areas, wastelands and fog-covered stretches of water are completely without human figures, even if the settings are indeed so urban. The places are empty and quiet – there are not even parked cars. Nothing is happening, nothing is moving. Despite this, the places are not without a certain dynamic. There is a kind of expectant tension in the nocturnal environments. The long shadows that sweep across the industrial yards seem to know more than we viewers. We can sense that something is about to happen on these empty yet meaningful stages.
In his article A Short History of Photography (1931) Walter Benjamin remarked on the absence of people in the street scenes from the outskirts of Paris photographed by Eugène Atget between 1900 and 1925: “The Porte d’Acceuil at the fortifications is empty, so too are the triumphal steps, the courtyards, the café terraces and, as is proper, the Place du Tertre.” Benjamin goes on to note how a strange effect is created by this emptiness, as if the photographs documented some terrible crime scenes. Atget usually took his pictures at dawn, before the city had awoken.
The magic of the empty stage had been recognised even before Benjamin. Carl Rottmann (1797–1850), court painter for the King of Bavaria, is somewhat forgotten these days, even though his fine series of Greek landscapes is on display at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich; the paintings suffered damage during the war and were restored around ten years ago. In the 1840s Rottmann painted 23 landscapes of historical sites from Ancient Greece, including Marathon, Thermopylae, Olympia and Corinth. Although the paintings depict sparse and topographically quite monotonous landscapes in modern Greece, he was able to instil in them a touch of ancient heroic deeds. The bare nature and the arching sky manage to suggest memories of events from the former golden age of western culture. By describing history through sparse landscapes alone, Rottmann appears to be suggesting that cultures are in fact transient and ephemeral events on the surface of the geological landscape. A vague melancholic mood is suspended above this kind of landscape, just as it is above Nyqvist’s night scenes of Helsinki.
A decade earlier, John Constable had experimented with the idea of instilling his landscapes with more significance by basing his compositions on religious paintings from the Renaissance but eliminating the human figures from them – i.e. historic events from the Bible. In this way the metaphysical significance in one of Rafael’s paintings, for example, would be transferred to Constable’s English landscape, creating a hint of associations with the original work.
Thomas Nyqvist’s night scenes (with the possible exception of the foggy shores) are potential stages for a drama. The cold artificial light of the city at night casts a tragic light on wastelands and industrial sites.
NIGHT WANDERER
There has been some speculation regarding the places depicted in Nyqvist’s paintings. For example, the shoreline scenes have been thought to have been painted by the Arctic Ocean. In fact, all the places can be found in Helsinki, even within a very limited area. He has depicted the recreational areas and parking areas along the shoreline between Hietaniemi and Taivallahti. Nyqvist has also depicted the northern shoreline of the Jätkäsaari district slightly to the south before the recent redevelopment of the area. On the other side of town he has depicted similar industrial and harbour areas in the Kalasatama district, which is also now undergoing redevelopment with the construction of new apartment buildings. Away from the city’s shorelines, he has managed to find overlooked places within the urban structure and other hidden spots undergoing change, such as a forested triangle between the streets Leppäsuonkatu and Pohjoinen Rautatiekatu – which has since disappeared – and the Lastenlehto and Lapinlahti parks while they were being cleaned up and renovated. He also discovered a strange asphalted maintenance area behind the Linnanmäki water tower and a cluttered area around the Suvilahti gas bells.
In other words, Nyqvist has walked, jogged and cycled in the late evening and night around Helsinki’s outlying shoreline areas, industrial areas, parks undergoing renovation and other similar spaces that are empty that time of night, carrying with him his camera from the 1970s. Nyqvist thus follows in a long line of wandering artists. The aesthetic walk was originally, in the late 18th century, a way of freeing oneself from the oppressive chains of urban life. Only when wandering alone in the unspoilt nature could one get in touch with one’s authentic self. Before long, however, the apparent mirror image of the romantic nature lover began to appear in literature: the urban poet who observes big city life as an outsider entered the scene. France especially has a long avant-garde tradition of weighing the meanings of modern metropolises while wandering aimlessly around them. Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud have remained idols of urban poets to this day, although it should be noted that all of these literary explorers wrote more about the city’s people than about buildings or places. The surrealist André Breton was inspired by the idea of drifting into strange adventures in Paris, almost in the same spirit as Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, the night wanderer in search of macabre experiences, in the 18th century.
The observation of urban spaces and places comes more to the fore in the projects of the French Situationists in the late 1950s. They also explored European metropolises, but above all Paris, by wandering about them aimlessly – “drifting” in their words. This radical political action, however, produced very unique conceptual art material. In terms of Nyqvist, it is perhaps more relevant to refer to the American artist Robert Smithson’s projects in the 1960s, when he left Manhattan to wander around New Jersey’s dilapidated industrial areas, giant road works, quarries and parking lots. Smithson photographed these “monuments” and “ruins in reverse” in black and white using a simple camera to provide the base material for his land art projects.
The more contemporary concept of urban explorer can also be applied to Nyqvist. The urban explorer seeks abandoned architectural sites and other spaces – factories, hospitals, metro corridors – on the outskirts of urban areas for reasons of adventure and photography (and sharing photos over the internet). Nyqvist too photographs the sites and dilapidated buildings he finds, but he began his night wandering long before the term urban exploration was coined, and he does so purely on the terms of his own art. Behind the urban exploration concept, one can sense the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979) and the post-apocalyptical video games that came after it. The paradigmatic wandering of the urban explorer would take him to such places as the abandoned and crumbling city of Pripyat, the chillingly poetic reality counterpart to the fictional milieu – the Zone – in Tarkovsky’s film. When we discuss this, Nyqvist admits the importance of Tarkovsky’s films to his spiritual landscape.
Nyqvist has a certain documenting attitude in his wanderings around Helsinki. He speaks of his desire to study the city and to find unique and vanishing scenes in the ever-changing urban environment. Urban exploration also involves documenting the recent past. An investigative attitude characterised Baudelaire as an urban poet who, according to his own analogy, collects, catalogues and archives the urban phenomena of Paris in the same way a ragpicker does with the discarded items he finds on the street. I mention this cultural history because Thomas Nyqvist embodies something common to all these wanderers. He is both an early romantic wanderer and a post-industrial urban explorer, even though his own wanderings are self-motivated and self-invented. Nyqvist emphasises that, despite everything, he has always striven to depict scenes that he encounters naturally on his way and not that he has sought out consciously.
THE ZONE
In his novel Les Misérables (1861) Victor Hugo describes a section of Paris outside the city walls known (like in Stalker) as the Zone (La Zone) in a somewhat strange way: “To observe the banlieu is to observe an amphibian.” By referring to an amphibian, Hugo is describing the abnormality and essential horror of outlying districts in modern metropolises. The amphibious creature that lives on the outskirts of the city is similar to the indescribable monster that crawls through the mud in the novels of H.P. Lovecraft. The creature that moves on land and sea lacks a clear identity and is in a state of potentially continuous change. The outlying districts of metropolises are indeed borderlands – between order and disorder, controlled and uncontrolled – chaotic areas in which the spread of disorder is a continuous threat. They are the flipsides of the order that dominates in the city centres.
Nyqvist’s painting , because the World is Round (1998) in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma captures the vague hybrid nature of “the Zone”. The landscape in the deep blue night is impressive yet troubling in its lack of clarity. It is hard even to make out whether it depicts water (the sea) or land. A kind of shoreline can be observed, yet the borders between the earth and the sky seem to merge into each other in some strange way. The scale of the scene is also troubling. Is the white pole in the centre the size of a flagpole or matchstick? It is as if the scene depicts a phenomenon like the original chaos. (In fact the painting is based on a photograph taken at night in late autumn/early winter at the Hietaniemi swimming beach, where sandbanks make the shoreline unclear. The white metal pole is in fact a volleyball net post approximately two metres in height.)
In many of Nyqvist’s paintings that depict the outskirts of the city, fences – chain link fences, board fences and other such walls – play an important visual role, but they also have symbolic meanings. The spread of disorder is controlled using both visible and invisible fences. They represent borders that try to keep the unpleasant amphibians at bay. Encircling industrial and warehouse areas, wastelands, parking lots, bridge underpasses and strange construction sites, the chain link fences structure the scenes in Nyqvist’s paintings, demarking and separating the fields and areas from each other. In night scenes the thin chain links are often invisible, yet the aluminium fence posts that support them shine all the more brighter in the harsh light of the streetlamps, demarking their borders clearly in the landscape. Even if the fence itself cannot be seen, it still exists. The role of Nyqvist’s fences is most clearly underlined, however, by the unnaturally brightly coloured board fence in the painting Green wall (2007). The solid fence separates a park in the foreground from a steaming construction site behind the fence. On the right edge of the painting in the shadow is another fence, a post fence that separates the park from the urban street space.
It can also be noted that Nyqvist’s more recent paintings depicting demolition sites and other open spaces have more plant life in them than his earlier works. His trees and bushes rise up in the backgrounds of his paintings as dark shadow-like figures. The silhouettes of leafy branches appear threatening, almost at times as if they are exploding. One can see in them how nature begins to reclaim the urban landscape in unplanned areas or those awaiting redevelopment.
Georges Bataille saw the dust falling everywhere as a symbol for the waste problem that is an unavoidable consequence of capitalistic production. The “zones” of major metropolises are in turn a version of this dust and waste on an urban scale. According to Bataille, the city is an organism that strives however it can to fight against the “dust” while constantly producing more of it at the same time. In this sense it tries to harness the wastelands and non-places on the outskirts of the city back into the production chain, but any success indoing so is fleeting as new wastelands and non-places are created all the time. With the constant renewal, unproductive plots and properties remain empty and abandoned, yet these negative spaces will at some point be reclaimed for productive use. It is indicative that, when discussing the places in his paintings, Nyqvist tells me: “Well, this place is completely different these days” or “Fortunately I found this place just as it was about to be demolished. The next day it had disappeared”. These “zones” in Helsinki are in continuous change. Freight ports, shipyards and heavy industry are making way for tidy residential districts and promenades, and other places that spoiled the urban structure are being cleaned up. The zones do not disappear entirely, however, they simply move somewhere else, to developing areas further off and eventually to third countries.
As has been shown above, Nyqvist’s places are indeed in a way recognisable places in Helsinki, yet in another way they are nevertheless anonymous and unlocatable because they are so transitory. The “zones” of Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama have just been wiped out to make way for new apartment buildings. The same has happened to the forested parks in Leppäsuo (see Wasteland, 2007) and on Sörnäistenkatu (e.g. Ad marginem, 2009–2010 and Umbra, 2011–2012). Undefined strips of urban nature have been cleaned up or removed entirely, the electricity pylons across the sea behind Seurasaari have transformed into design items, the barracks at the Hietaniemi swimming beach have been replaced by a new building, and the bubble dome has been moved to an even more outlying area. The buildings depicted by Nyqvist are either ruins undergoing demolition or temporary, lightweight and portable structures: construction site huts, bubble domes, electricity pylons and wooden kayak sheds. This uncertain and destruction prone nature of Nyqvist’s buildings also emphasises the uncertain and “under process” state of the “zones”. Instability and transience characterise these non-places lacking as they do any historical landmarks; they are like mirror images of the continuity, order and harmony of the city centre. The physical environments depicted by Nyqvist are mainly connected to the worlds of industry (industrial areas and power lines for electricity distribution, the gas bell at Suvilahti and the water tower at Linnanmäki) and recreation (swimming, weightlifting, kayaking, ball games). This combination may seem contradictory, yet both are phenomena that characterise specifically the modern city. The tight connection between industry and recreation defined also those outlying districts and suburbs of Paris depicted in the late 19th century by the peinture de la vie modern. Industrial and recreational milieus appear side by side in such Parisian suburbs as Asnières, Argenteuil and Courbevoie, whose names appear in the titles of such paintings. By juxtaposing the smokestack industry (and gas bells, for example) and railway bridges along the Seine with carefree paddling, artists such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac were depicting the milieu of the capitalistic consumer society that had just begun to grow. They were inspired precisely by the haphazard and incomplete nature of these areas compared to the tidy “spectacle” of the centre of Paris. The smokestacks of Ruoholahti, gas bells of Suvilahti, metro bridge of Kulosaari and kayak sheds opposite Seurasaari are all structures found in Nyqvist’s Helsinki that correspond almost amusingly with the favourite spots of the Impressionists in 19th-century Paris.
The eccentric and pedantic Neo-Impressionist Seurat differed from his contemporaries in that he did not view the Paris Zone with the same enthusiastic gaze of the Impressionists, instead seeing it in a quite melancholic light. He was not interested in the petite bourgeoisie, workers and unemployed in the suburbs but rather in the atmosphere of the physical milieu. In his dark Conté crayon drawings from the 1880s, an industrial area at dawn has the same sense of melancholy as in Nyqvist’s nocturnal industrial areas or the foggy shoreline of Hietaniemi.
Nyqvist’s central themes correspond largely to those of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, yet this is by no means self evident when viewing the paintings. The connection becomes apparent only after longer analysis. Yet Nyqvist does not, in fact, celebrate the modern – as Baudelaire famously said, “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent” – world in which today’s consumer society began to form. The “modern” places are viewed from our own post-industrial perspective – like a trace or echo of something past. Nyqvist’s
city seems to be dying beneath its pretty surface. In the 2000s he depicts the sunset of the modern world, not its optimistic growth. The poetic mind likes to view the city as a living and breathing organism, yet as the product of capitalistic production and consumption the city is a place that is easy to get tired of. The Situationists already in their time in the late 1950s and early 1960s criticised the modern city for being too planned and devoid of mystery and meaning. Cities have simply become too boring. They believed that playful projects were needed – such as navigating around Berlin using a map of Stockholm – in order to restore the appeal of the city. I would suggest that Nyqvist’s city is by no means without its appeal and that he can therefore be counted among the urban poets. He has painted his Helsinki in varying moods as a living, roughly beautiful, sweetly melancholic and meaningful milieu.
AT THE RUINS OF ROME AND HELSINKI
Although the Helsinki of Thomas Nyqvist is roughly beautiful and offers fine views, it is nevertheless marked by shadows, a constantly changing and crumbling periphery of the city centre, terrain vague. After 2008, real twisted ruins begin to appear in his paintings, and he continues to paint these to this day. These paintings are based on the major transformations of the Kalasatama and Kyläsaari districts, where entire industrial buildings are making way for new residential neighbourhoods. Even though these paintings depict actual demolition sites in contemporary Helsinki, the scenes can be described as almost apocalyptic. Enormous collapsed and broken concrete slabs, piles of bricks, twisted steel reinforcement rods and the explosive silhouettes of trees make these scenes dramatic and violent. These ruins are not the work of time but rather of bulldozers. They are reminiscent of photographs of the concrete bunkers of the Atlantic Wall in the Second World War. Nyqvist also succeeds in creating associations almost furtively with ancient ruins: collapsed and broken concrete pillars are like fallen marble columns. All of this is viewed in the vapid light of poisonous cloud cover. At times the ruins are covered by a thin deathly white layer of snow – “like a funeral veil”, as Boullée would say.
Ruins are by no means an unknown phenomenon in the modern world. Images of destruction and decay are very much a part of these times. War, terrorism, the collapse of communism, ecological crises, economic recession and the bankruptcy of the “modern” project itself have produced destruction and ruins – on the other hand, these phenomena can also be depicted using images of ruins. In the field of the arts this has been done with photography and moving images – but not through painting, as Nyqvist does. This international art trend differs from Nyqvist’s project also in that it generally depicts building sites that have been forgotten and abandoned for years and decades: suburbs that have been deserted by their residents, desolate factory buildings, disused Cold War military bases and missile silos, unfinished road works. Nyqvist’s buildings and milieus are not so hopeless. Nyqvist’s concrete ruins are in fact quite transitory. “Fortunately I found this place just in time. The next day it had disappeared,” he says. The remains of the parks depicted in the aforementioned paintings Ad marginem and Umbra are in turn “nature’s ruins” that have already been removed. Nyqvist’s Helsinki is (too) tidy and efficient. He complains that each year it is harder to find places that could inspire painters. The Situationists were right: the modern efficient (Nordic) city is over-developed to the point that it lacks interest.
This is not the first time, however, that Nyqvist paints ruins. In the 1990s he produced two impressive series of paintings depicting ruins based on the black and white prints of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Nyqvist’s Piranesi paintings from that period are fascinating also because, by studying them, one feels that one can gain access to Nyqvist’s most private artistic passions: why on earth would he read books presenting the prints of Piranesi? What does he see in Piranesi? In his prints, Piranesi – whom the French Romantic author Theophile Gautier referred to as “the demon of architectural nightmares” – presented his own architectural fantasies and designs for clocks, chairs and fireplaces. He also reconstructed ancient Rome and documented its engineering marvels, columns, vases, candelabras and random fragments. Nyqvist only refers to those prints, however, that depict the ruins of ancient ruins and monuments in and around Rome.
Piranesi’s Rome is a dead city of submerged or half-buried ruins. In his pessimistic vision, the smallness of the present day is highlighted by the unrealistically large scale that he gives to the ancient ruins. In unreal lighting that casts long shadows, Lilliputian 18th-century people postured aimlessly among the ruins. With his extremely angled perspectives, contrasts between light and shadow and morbid atmosphere, Piranesi creates quite sublime effects. The ruins in themselves have characteristics that make them sublime. They are reminiscent of destruction and death. They tell of the possibility of the destruction of entire cultures and the transience of human existence. In addition, their fragmentary incompleteness stimulates the imagination to the extreme in the same way that unfinished sketches and bodily sculptures. This is why Edmund Burke considered sketches and torsos to be objects that produce sublime vibrations. The architectural fantasies of Etienne-Louis Boullée would not have been possible without the example offered by Piranesi’s prints. Boullée fantasised cenotaphs that would appear as if the earth has swallowed a part of them, as if they were unavoidably sinking beneath the surface. This “architecture of shadows” would stand out impressively against the impression created by “even darker shadows”, he believed.
Nyqvist’s reinterpretations are not Piranesian copies or pastiches of them. He selects, transforms, amplifies and makes them his own. He carries their tradition forward. Piranesi himself called the Roman ruins as “living, speaking ruins”, and he drew them as if they were personalities of whom he was creating portraits. Nyqvist has seen in Piranesi’s ruins clearly human-like characteristics: openings and shapes are reminiscent of eyes, noses and mouths. In his earlier painting series he further highlighted this latent anthropomorphism.
This makes the ruins appear like an Expressionist stage design for something like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In his painting Untitled (After Piranesi) (1994) a section of the wall in the Temple of Minerva Medica that has opened up is like living tissue: the building has become a living organism. Perhaps Nyqvist’s later bubble domes, prisms and concrete ruins are direct descendents of Piranesi’s parlanti ruine? They too rise up from the field of the image as solitary monuments and almost human “quasi subjects”.
The first paintings in his Piranesi series are relatively colourless. They still follow clearly the black and white graphic expression of their example, and cold blue and red shades dominate them. By contrast colours gain an important role in later series. In this way Nyqvist adds layers to Piranesi’s sublime drama. Especially in the skies that appear behind the buildings, Nyqvist is inspired in a way that makes the black and white skies of Piranesi transform into the agitated skies of El Greco. The threatening nature of Piranesi’s scenes is increased, and they become almost hallucinatory visions. Despite the Expressionistic colours, Nyqvist’s palette retains a certain graphic quality that continues also in his later output. The colour scale remains twofold: warm yellow-brown tones (from ochre to burned umbra) on the one hand, cold shades from blue-black to turquoise on the other. Nyqvist also says that the restrained “washed” colour scale of film – and especially Tarkovsky’s films – have influenced his own colour palette. Tarkovsky himself emphasised that the softening task of colours and tones is to prevent a too naturalistic impression of reality and bring film closer to paintings. He achieved this (in addition to technology) by filming as often as possible in fog and mist, for example. This colour-neutralising mist has also settled over Nyqvist’s Hietalahti shoreline in the early 2000s. In 1995 Nyqvist painted a small study-like piece entitled Rose Zone based on Piranesi’s “Royal or consular tomb in the Alban Hills” (Sepolcro Regio, o Consolare, inciso nella rupe del Monte Albano, 1764). This exemplifies Nyqvist’s interest in dramatic unnatural lighting. In the powerful lighting from above, the tomb remains an incomprehensible and mysterious structure unless the viewer is familiar with it in advance. The sharp white light cuts the structure in two, one half remaining in a Boullée-esque black shadow (“A black painting of the architecture of shadows that is drawn with an effect created by even blacker shadows,” as Boullée imagined). This cold light that creates such dark shadows appears to be the same that later illuminates the nocturnal weightlifting equipment and industrial areas in Night Scene.
Piranesi’s scenes of ruins were peopled by aimless or melancholy characters from the 18th century. They came from the world of Venetian capriccios and architecture fantasies, where their role was to create a mood that appears meaningful yet remains devoid of any clear content. Nyqvist systematically left out human figures from his Piranesi paintings – and he has continued to paint empty stages ever since. In a way he has done the same to Piranesi that Constable did to Rafael. Should the emotional characters of Piranesi be transferred in the mind to the nocturnal streets of Nyqvist’s Helsinki paintings?
MATTER – FORM – MATTER
Certain phenomena have almost surreptitiously become fields surrounding the paintings of Thomas Nyqvist. His paintings activate the viewer in a way that leads one to weigh the processes of change, disorder, ruin, chaos, destruction and death. Ultimately this is disorientating, as Nyqvist’s paintings are primarily viewed as impressive works of art. Initially one’s attention focuses on the skilful calligraphy of his brushstrokes and the fine tones created as each layer of paint appears through the other. One then notices the dampened mood created by the darkness, fog and winter. Piranesi, Boullée, Hugo, Bataille, Smithson, Tarkovsky and others, however, have led to this: to consider the general process of decay and disorder, entropy.
Is it so that the ultimate underlying theme of Thomas Nyqvist’s art is the slow process of our civilisation’s decay – Die Untergang des Abendlandes – about which he creates his own unique and impressive poetry? And is it ultimately just about this? Even though Nyqvist is certainly not the type of artist who would prescribe a defining theme for his art in advance, something quite logical in his art can still be sensed – something that by nature is considerably more abstract than that Untergang.
In his recent painting Rubble (2012–2014), as in the other paintings in the same series, a large pile of bricks can be seen in front of an industrial building facing demolition. The bricks fill the foreground of the painting and stop the viewer, preventing one’s (virtual) progress deeper into the painting’s space. The view is arrested by the pile of bricks. In these large paintings the bricks at the forefront are in fact actual size. Some time ago these bricks made up a building, and they appear to be in good enough shape that they could still be used to build something new. In accordance with the Aristotelian tradition, we can consider that bricks are the matter that actualises the building’s form. In this case, however, there has been a change: the building’s form has collapsed into matter. In this matter lies the potentiality only to become a building. Of course, the striking brick shape of these objects is a form in itself, which is one of the forms of actualisation of the clay material.
Such broad philosophising may seem redundant if it were not for the fact that similar ideas unavoidably come to mind when considering many of Nyqvist’s recent paintings. Numerous examples can be found in them of how form has disintegrated back into matter. Many paintings feature piles of construction waste containing concrete, bricks, rebar and asphalt, as well as other piles of gravel, soil and earth. Furthermore, the piles of leaves in Ad marginem (2009–2010) and Umbra (2011–2012) will decompose back into soil, and a torn piece of paper shines white in the night scenes depicted in the Urban landscape series (2005). Everything has disintegrated back into dead matter,
though they originally took the form of a building, road, tree or newspaper. Traces of these kinds of processes can be seen very often in Nyqvist’s recent paintings, and signs of them can be seen also in his earlier works. The clearest example of this is the ruins from his Piranesi period. The ruins have been destroyed and disintegrated over hundreds of years by time and erosion in a process that still continues. Manfredo Tafuri aptly describes the nature depicted in Piranesi’s etchings of ruins as “corrosive, diabolical and antihuman”. The same nature also grinds the buildings and monuments in Nyqvist’s Piranesi paintings into their original parts. The entire amphibian landscape in his painting , because the World is Round balances on the chaotic edge somewhere between essential formlessness and a sense of gaining form. If we consider that the dark monolith in the Night scene paintings is a cenotaph, then it too is reminiscent of the process of disintegration: “for dust you are and to dust you will return”. Many of the buildings depicted by Nyqvist are so fragile and temporary that they in themselves suggest their potential decline and negation back into their components: once the bubble dome is emptied, it no longer has the form of a dome.
The process of disintegration and increase in disorder is therefore not just a literal theme behind Nyqvist’s art, instead it suggests a more subtle theme of the disintegration of universal form. The process of metamorphosis that can be sensed in the world of quiet paintings does its work, even though we cannot see the bulldozers and machinery that day by day transform the landscape on the periphery of the city into something different.
There is still one important and surprising dimension to the Nyqvistian metamorphosis between matter and form that I cannot help but point out. In my mind I go through the entire artistic oeuvre of Thomas Nyqvist from 1980 onwards. The artist’s own self-published booklet Pieni retrospektiivi/Small Retrospective is useful here, as it contains around thirty photographs of his paintings from over the years. The retrospective does not include all his paintings, so I fill in the missing pieces by memory. Already before his Piranesi paintings, Nyqvist’s output was defined by periods and series that differ from each other clearly.
Small Retrospective begins with a painting from the series Vaarala (1980, also entitled Short Moments). In the paintings in this series the evenly toned field covering the entire canvas is structured by barely discernible brushstrokes in the form of impasto-like textures. Nyqvist’s paintings progress from these formless harmonic fields of colour at the beginning of the decade to – still abstractly expressed – informalistic-type gesture paintings: organic amoeba-like elemental forms begin to take shape on the surface of the canvas (for example Untitled XII, 1981; Wall, 1983). In the mid-1980s, rectangular grids and blinds at the forefront of the abstract colour paintings began to structure the picture field. They attempt to create some degree of clear forms from the informalistic field of paint (for example Dark Land, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, 1988). In the next, completely new phase, dark, threatening and very clear forms that are closely reminiscent of buildings and trees rise as silhouette-like figures from the light background of the canvas (for example Building and Form, 1991).
Nyqvist’s Piranesi paintings follow immediately afterwards. Nyqvist’s artistic output progresses from these formless harmonic fields of colour – almost from the painter’s amorphous material itself – via amoebic lines to more solid, architectural forms and eventually to genuine figurativeness, to his Piranesi paintings of massive buildings and cave-like spaces. From here Nyqvist moves to ever larger illusionistic precision. The paint material has found its form, but the theme of metamorphosis between matter and form has not gone anywhere. Instead, it has become the subject of the paintings. We see the terrain vague on the outskirts of the city, the ruins of buildings and piles of matter in which formlessness is once again taking over.
When viewing Nyqvist’s new almost illusionistic paintings – such as Ad marginem or Rubble, for example – something strange can also be noticed. The pile of bricks in Rubble has deformed in some places into ochre-coloured ground colour, so that the area in question does not present any specific object in the world of the painting. In Ad marginem the foliage of the trees disintegrates here and there into large formless fields of paint. In the same painting there are some impasto-like lumps of paint that have nothing to do with what the painting is depicting. These are, of course, normal ways – familiar already from modern art – of tying the figurative representation to the two-dimensional surface, reminding the viewer that painting is ultimately about art and not about reproducing the foliage of trees. Nevertheless, considering my reflections above, this phenomenon gains more serious significance.
These amorphous “patches” reflect the process of change in which the pictorial representation itself begins to disintegrate into an abstraction and simply the material used by the painter. The representation we see is disintegrating and receding in front of eyes back to the material from which it was formed. (Or is it so that these fields are anyway just dead matter that has not yet been given its living form?) In the world of Nyqvist’s paintings, which initially appear so low key, continuous and multilayered transformations – both literal and physical – are taking place.
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The artistic output of Thomas Nyqvist may seem like a very logical and stylish continuum with his dark and foggy urban scenes, yet surprising shifts can be found from lyrical shoreline views to dramatically “horrific” scenes of ruins. Nyqvist’s paintings cast a spell on us with their fine quality and scenes, but before long they also make us contemplate what else they are about.
Nyqvist takes us to the almost unrecognisable outskirts of the city, and he sees a strange kind of poetry in such unexpected places. He is a patient and contemplative observer of the urban world, opening our eyes to see the classical beauty that lies therein. The timeless values of architecture, space and openness are the targets of his praise. He finds these values in places where we did not think of looking.
Nyqvist’s landscapes almost always have a strange threatening nature, at times even distressing. This can be seen already in his earlier paintings before the feelings of “horror” conveyed by Piranesi. The threatening aspect is nevertheless always refined to such an extent that it maintains the titillating enigmatic and mysterious atmosphere of the paintings. For this reason I consider Nyqvist’s sublime more like that of Edmund Burke than the later versions of the concept, as Burke connected his idea of the sublime specifically to a sense of horror while emphasising that the sense of threat and horror only works artistically if the viewer can maintain a sense of self-preservation. The threatening nature of Nyqvist’s paintings is always subtle and artistically filtered.
In keeping with long European traditions, Nyqvist’s depicts in his landscapes areas where nature and culture are in dialogue – just as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain did, except Nyqvist has transferred their Roman Campagna to contemporary Helsinki. Nyqvist subtly considers the centuries-old problems of depicting nature in terms of the phenomenological encounter with the landscape and the utility of traditional landscape painting styles. He has created a personal synthesis out of the artistic tradition, cinematic expression and an awareness of his own era.
Thomas Nyqvist takes us along strange roads to marvel at the beauty of Helsinki’s industrial areas, demolition sites and snow-covered fields, yet he takes us to a world that does not really exist. During such a sleepwalk we should not forget for one moment that our journey does not take place in time or space but rather in front of the painted canvas. Thomas has conjured up in front of us large Venetian-like semi-transparent canvases through whose tonerich layers and light arabesques we see spaces that are simultaneously those that we remember well and those that we are seeing now for the first time.
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