Johan Nobell Flash Art International 38:243 (July-September 2005): 74.
Johan Nobell at Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn, NY. April 22-May 23.
The cartoon-y palette and curlicue style of Johan Nobell’s stark and whimsically apocalyptic geography, is part Road Runner and part Dr. Seuss. The Swedish painter's ambiguous quasi-narrative landscapes are dominated by humpy hills – suggestive of landfills, strip mines, or graves. Often his hills become pyramid-shaped monuments, composed front and center, iconic and hallowed. They are topped with funny trees and littered with abstract hints of tools, machine parts, signs, and explosions. Nobell looks inside his own sacred mounds in The Geography of We (2004) as an apparent cross-section reveals figures, easily identifiable as skeletons, buried within. In Landscape With Gumshoe and Owls (2005), the holy significance of Nobell’s mound is implied again as a ladder dangles from a wavy dark cloud to meet it.
The ladder, a favorite motif of Miró, for one, makes explicit Nobell’s conscious artistic debt to the The Surrealists as does Meerschaum (2004), in which Nobell substitutes his own iconic mound for the eponymous pipe. In several very loosely rendered non-landscape works, Nobell stretches his symbolic vocabulary toward more forced psychological significance. Of the twelve paintings included in this show, Nobell’s oblique figurative language makes the greatest impact when it is more psychologically associative, rather than literally indicative. And, as in a work like Shipwreck (2004), Nobell’s best efforts result when he executes his abstracted landscapes with the precise brushwork and miniature technique that Nobell commands with apparent ease.