The newspaper Smålandsposten 2010-02-15
Markus Åkesson, an artist to keep an eye on.
In symbiosis with nature:
Bestiary
By: Markus Åkesson
Where: The National Museum of Glass, Växjö
Ends: 29th of August
Glass Sculptures and Paintings
Markus Åkesson, born in 1975 and working at Pukeberg Art Studios in Nybro is inviting us to a Bestiary in Glasdialogen at the National Museum of Glass. It may sound frightening because a bestiary is a collection of fable animals that can appear in monster-like fashion, something we have inherited from medieval times and that has emerged again in reenactments, fantasy and fiction.
Markus Åkesson is offering the spectator beautiful magical objects that are so close natures own creations that some of them could have been taken directly from the sea.
The objects called Xenos are very similar to octopuses, whereas the large paintings are creating an ongoing dialogue, a silent conversation with the objects and constitutes a powerful charge in the interplay between the objects. Xenos means stranger in the Greek language. Markus Åkesson poses questions by using nature and by depicting man and humanity in his paintings with a realist poignancy, a nature that we want to control but we never really are able to.
The naked girl in the painting is wearing antlers. She seems to be indifferent or in some kind of trance. Her surrounding is cold, it is always night time in Åkessons images but the girl is being illuminated in a spectacular fashion by the headlights of a car.
Maybe she has managed to enter into a world where the demarcations, the borders between nature, animal and human being are being erased? Another painting is showing two dead deers. Their horns have got stuck into each other, that's why they have died. The title of this work is Locked positions. In another variation on this theme the horns are made of glass, ethereal, turquoise. The objects and the paintings are working together and becomes a narrative that seeks out and poses existential questions. It is about searching, but it is a secularized search.
Human beings are collecting bestiaries but what about the human being herself? A longing to be part of nature is being expressed, a longing to become symbiotic, a part of nature but we cannot accept nature as it really is, seems to be what Åkesson is saying. Our interference with nature can turn it into a bestiary and maybe this has already happened? The naked woman shown on the largest painting is holding an octopus-like object in front of her, in front of her sexual parts, as a shield and at the same time as something strange and unfamiliar. She could be the woman in the film by Ridley Scott, Alien. The artist talks about an “apocalyptic daydream”. The expression of the woman is caught in a mix of reproach and anger, maybe even madness.
In one of the two rooms of the exhibition – dense, compact and neat – there is what might be the preliminary stage of the object Xenos, the incredible beautiful “mollusc” taken up from the sea on to dry land. This time in a painting with a background consisting of a piece of loudly patterned green wallpaper with medallions. Somehow safe and homelike. The Xenos object stands upright in the picture and resembles a brain.
In this space I also the find the shining objects called Tic Pastor, at the same time repulsive and beautifully formed. A kind of contemporary preachers. Blood sucking types with the horns of a bull. Bestiary indeed. Please come and see and experience this exhibition. The exhibition is going on for quite a long time before it continues to Berlin and Markus Åkesson is an artist to keep an eye on. Definitely.
Text: Tina Persson
Translation: Boel Olsson