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Born 1966 in Sweden
Initially, Per Wizén’s works may look like paintings or photographs of paintings. The worlds of Quattrocento or Baroque masters seem familiar. There is an element of seduction in the depictions of flesh in movement, in the generous colours of draperies. This may be seductive. But there is nothing pleasantly seductive about the contents of Wizén’s images, fraught with different, violent and troubling relations as they are, and the technique he uses to achieve them resembles that of sampling in much of contemporary music.
The process of production is much more complex than the first glance may hint at. What we are seeing starts with minute collage work made by hand. Reproductions from art books have been cut up and laboriously pieced together to form startling new pictures. Wizén is not a passive consumer of art historical works. This is post-production art history. Based on close observation and analysis of the originals. Then the collages have been slightly reworked by a digital process. Not to alter them, but rather to smooth away any unevenness, so that they can be fused into persuasive wholes that allow for reproduction on a larger scale. Often a scale close to that of the original paintings. Wizén recreates pictures that have never existed. Media theorist Lev Manovich says: “The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media. In this respect new media is post-media or meta-media, as it uses old media as its primary material.”
Wizén started out with a series called “Reworkings” from 1998. It was based on Caravaggio’s paintings and an aim to recharge them, but also to understand some of the elements in them. This is Wizén’s most overtly erotic images. Caravaggio’s figures meet each other in new constellations, like the actors of a film where Wizén has written the script. Its dark eroticism, depicting the ways of the flesh, merge the profane with the sacred in scenes of domination, abuse and sacrifice. The images could be memories of childhood, not necessarily true memories, but memories made up by the adult, based on own fears, urges and desires.
Through desire man seeks joy but also wishes that the road to fulfilment will never end. To continue and to complete are two parallel and competing endeavours, and form a contradiction that we seem unable to solve. This could be seen both as the artist’s driving force and the key to many of the scenes he depicts here.
Lives and works in Malmö, Sweden
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 Per Wizén, Reworkings, 1998, 125 x 152 cm, AP, cibachrome from paper collage, Courtesy Stene Projects Stockholm |
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 Per Wizén, Reworkings, 1998, 140 X 205 cm, AP, cibachrome from paper collage, Courtesy Stene Projects Stockholm |
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 Per Wizén, Reworkings, 1998, 45,5 X 68 cm, edition 3+2AP, cibachrome from paper collage, Courtesy Stene Projects, Stockholm |
