Tommy Carlsson was born in 1958 in a small village in the south of Sweden. A painter and a graphic artist, he now lives in Långasjö (Småland) and Stockholm. In 1977 Tommy has graduated from Öland’s School of Art, where he developed a passion for the exquisite still life techniques of the Dutch masters of the 16th and the 17th centuries. Since 1981, Tommy’s thought-provoking yet meditative work has been showcased at 130 solo and collective exhibitions, held throughout Sweden, Denmark, Germany, England, Spain and USA. Tommy’s ‘directly ascertainable, quasi tangible, figurative reality’ is reminiscent of a curiosity cabinet, where each individual painting is a separate wonder room with manifold hints, allusions and engravings to explore.
The artist endows inanimate objects with a ‘soul’, with charisma and a voice.
Tommy derives his motifs impromptu from the immediate personal environment and unravels symbolic significance of these seemingly ordinary objects, which, in his hands, transform into contemporary hieroglyphs that forward a multitude of moral messages and stories, in a perplexing at times but soothing and quiet voice.
Enigmatic and a little bit riddle-like, his oeuvre stimulates interpretative efforts. Ambiguous and playful, but intellectual, ironic-humorous and deeply philosophical, Tommy’s imagery is devoid of imperative narratives, leaving room for imagination, game, subjectivity and alignment. Although, memento mori – life’s uncertainty and transience, remains an unobtrusive red thread throughout Tommy’s work, beautifully continuing the tradition of the Dutch Golden Age in this respect.
Existing at the point of intersection of the past, present and future, Tommy’s artworks serve as exits from the flow of time, facilitating a reflective state of mind. As the stories communicated by Tommy’s objects combine with the hypertrophied materialistic representation and the minimalist compositions, Tommy’s work entertainingly balances between inducing mental activation and simultaneously conveying the concepts of absolute equilibrium and absence of noise.
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