Stieg Persson

Stieg Persson
Australian, born 1959; lives and works in Melbourne

Barbabietole di Chioggia 2021
oil on linen
Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

Statement:

Barbabietole di Chioggia is the culmination of a series of paintings immersed in the pursuit of colour. Happily autotelic, these works have drawn from an array of Venetian ironwork and Italian food for their forms but have prioritised colour, wilfully ignoring sobriety and embracing the spirit of an ‘accelerationist’ aesthetic.

To this end, traditional earth pigments collide with the vivid chemical colours of our present, reflective metallic paint is contrasted against duller tone, veils of transparency are opposed to deep opacities. The aim is to achieve concentrated intensities, oscillating pictorial spaces, chromatic collisions of rhythmic linear patterns and obliquely rendered objects (in this case various versions of Venetian carpaccio), leaving us with an eye darting and bobbing—a saccade—signalling our presences in this very moment