Jonas Dahlberg

Magazzino is pleased to announce the third solo show by Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg in the gallery space.

After having focused in recent years on large-scale public commissions, Dahlberg produced a new series of works with a more intimate and personal approach, echoing an inner landscape of visual and sound memories, and an immersive fascination with nature.

A series of photographs, both in colour and black & white, depicts common birds sitting on tree branches in their natural environment. What appears to be a skilful snapshot of a chance encounter with nature, is in fact a natural setting carefully prepared and pre-constructed by the artist himself, who stages a sort of cinematographic diorama and waits for the perfect instant to occur. Dahlberg therefore exercises a strong control over the image’s final result, although taking into account the small variations that chance and nature necessarily generate.

In the other work exhibited he presents us with a different kind of diorama. An amplified microcosm, closely inspected as if looked at from under a magnifying lens. The installation titled Music Box follows the movements of the camera inside a small sounding mechanism, an object that bears a personal significance for the artist.

The mechanics of the music box, cylinder, metal elements and pins, enlarged and magnified to an industrial scale, remind us of the visual language of films such as Chaplin’s Modern Times andFritz Lang’s Metropolis, as well as the austere objectivity of German photographer Adolf Lazi’s 1930’s photographic series.

In all the exhibited works, time is the cornerstone element, a time restrained and dilated, up to the freeze instant of the shutter closure. Where as the suspended staged sets, are used by Dahlberg simultaneously as methodology and narrative device.