Tempus Fugit

Group show, Un silence qui en dit long, cur. Amir El May, Hi-Flow/Culture Plan-les-Ouates, Geneva, CH, 2024
Solo show, Back Beat Bolaget, Sandviken, SE, 2023

Time flies and deceives us quickly. It slips through our fingers to escape in an irreplaceable way. Just as elusive as it was once captured in Virgil’s archaic aphorism: Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus*.

Tempus Fugit, 330 x 640 x 930 cm, installation, antique furniture and lighting, objects collected in blue glass and gilded metal, curtains, mixed media on linen, lacquer on plaster, paper mache masks, Back Beat Bolaget, Sandviken, SE, 2023 ©Samael Törnberg

Over time there are also things that catch up with us, moments when what has been perceived as a desirable sweetness leaves us with a rancid aftertaste. Eventually, even our most traumatic memories, which some of us have been able to marginalise, threaten to haunt us. And perhaps our ghosts will hit us like waves, more and more intensely; as a result of how we have tried to force the depth of geological processes, how we have exploited an increasingly polluted landscape and continue to fly in and out of a fragmented geography, just to concentrate our wealth instead of letting it trickle down as something common.

Sylvain Gelewski’s exhibition Tempus Fugit carefully navigates through our ambivalent concepts of time, our social positioning and the pursuit of some kind of dignity. At first we are confronted by a spatial scene reminiscent of an expanded still life depiction. A variety of obsolete furniture and heirlooms, all of which have lost their sentimental value, have been brought together based on how their appearance relates to the primary colours of the Swedish flag. With the light of the blue fields refracted through the mass of glassware and the golden intentions in the yellow cross shining in the brass and plated metal, a trope of some sort of momento mori emerges. All together, and with the walls draped in a billowing velvet, the installation’s disparate yet precise materiality is arranged to form an associative scenography, open to a range of different reflections.

During the opening, the installation is activated by a performance. With their faces veiled as in a masquerade for past regents and nobility, two bodies are moving in an exclusive choreography. The gestures are both gentle and slightly eerie, with twisted arms and backs that bends under an invisible weight. They set the table and clear the table, while pointing their fingers and accusations at each other. It is a movement of bodies dependent on the discursive order in the confluence of different times, where patriarchal and colonial structures have been inherited, internalised and sadly repeated through generations. The notes that underlie this performance are not only visible, they also come as a collection of love songs and a voice over reciting a text by the artist. And although the bodies will be gone after the curtain has fallen, this soundscape leaves a recurring trace in the room for the rest of the exhibition period. These are the words and references of significance that Gelewski spins into a Adriane thread of love and solidarity, but also of uncertain grief and doubt, to guide visitors through the exhibition’s many layers and details. The narrative reaches back in time, dwells on ancient myths and is swept along in an animated story about the looted gold veins and artefacts of imperialism. Here, as a response to his residency in Sandviken, the artist is particularly interested in Sweden’s historical position as a country, with the branches of a five-hundred-year-old royal genealogy, the later recognition as a welfare state in peace, the near hundred years of expressed neutrality and its contrast in arms export, the violence against the indigenous population of Sápmi, the increased inequality of today and the, more and more, widespread fear of the other.

As a crucial part of the exhibition, there is a series of framed canvases that, in both critical and redemptive ways, capture the main lines of Sylvain Gelewski’s presented work. The blue and golden tones, with all their potential symbolism, become clearly visible again. And with its wide margins covered in oil and acrylic, and charcoal suggesting a floral ornamentation in the distance, the court jester’s peculiar features take shape at the center of the paintings, drawn directly on the linen with ink and felt-pen. One by one they turn to us and testify to how they once entertained their masters, what attributes they were expected to wear, and how they, with disarming humour, could call out the inconvenient truths without being decapitated. These paintings, with its temperamental changes in their brushstrokes, can be regarded as a sort of laughing mirrors (not only facing the Swedes). But the self-righteous smiles have been distorted into wry grins, perhaps not so much by what the mirrors reflect, but because of what time reveals before our eyes.

Erik Anderman

*Meanwhile, the irreplaceable time escapes. Vegilius, Georgica, 29 PCE

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Tempus Fugit, 25′, performance, music, text, paper mache masks, found gold-plated metal brooches and necklaces, Back Beat Bolaget, Sandviken, SE, 2023 ©Samael Törnberg

Tempus Fugit is inspired by the imagery of the court jester, the mask and the party, social role-playing or seduction, sarcasm or masquerade. Tempus Fugit or the frantic race forward. An attempt to grasp the meaning of two colours through stories – The gold of light, the world and value and the blue of dreams, the royal family and work.

I work all night, I work all day to pay the bills I have to pay.

Ain’t it sad?

And still there never seems to be a single penny left for me.

That’s too bad.

In my dreams I have a plan.

If I got me a wealthy man.

I wouldn’t have to work at all.

I’d fool around and have a ball.

Perhaps what all the songs about colour have in common is love? If love is a question of taste and colours, we are entitled to wonder whether it is bitter or made of sweetness. In the first case, I love you but I’m leaving you. In the second, you love me and I love you back. Tempus Fugit or the outline of an answer to the crucial question: which of us ate the last sweet?

Choreography, performance: Anna Berglund, Ida Long
Voice, sound: Henry Sims
Masks: Valter Johansson
Photography: Samael Törnberg
Graphic design, assistance: Daniel Nordin
Coordination: Karin Bäckström, Jon Perman

Soundtrack playlist:
Recording of the Sandviken ice cream seller’s bell, Sylvain Gelewski, 2023
The Mysterious Cities of Gold (Swedish version), Nobuyoshi Koshibe and Katsuo Ohno, 1982
Le Ciel Bleu, Dalida, 1962
Money, Money, Money, ABBA, 1976
This Is Not A Love Song, Public Image Limited, 1983
It’s just a burning memory, The Caretaker, 2016