Born in a small town Nils Gabrielsson begun to study philosophy from an early age thanks to his parents, who both studied philosophy at the university.Gabrielsson then travelled around Europe and is now settled in Italy where he works as a researcher at the university.
His photographic work doesn’t tell stories. I much prefer to build a weaving of single images or sequences, like “rhizomas” and work around landscapes and bodyscapes as a bridge to narrate about memory/memories and the sense of time/consciousness.
Blanked
“There’s no time here, not any more”
From the last episode of Sapphire & Steel – 1982
Blanked is a project born out of many years of shooting, a weaving of almost 100 pictures I developed and realized through the years, years sometimes I wait to develop my rolls. It’s a project haunted by the non-persistence of quanta, the doubt of qualia, and the slow fading of future and memories.
At the same time, it is a reflection on the image and the process of making images in photography. For Derrida cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms, especially when crossed with psychoanalysis, the art of allowing ghosts to come back. So if cinema is the art of ghosts is photography the art of freezing them? I think it is. It’s the art that allows us to stare at them, as long as we want. We capture a ghost and put it on a “tissue”, like a Sindone. Once caught, the boundaries between the ghost and the tissue disappear – paper, chemicals, impression – we created a limbo where there’s no time, not anymore.
Self-taught or art school?
Completely self-taught. I come from philosophy studies, studies that gave me a lot of art and cinema training but in the practice, everything is about self-education.
If you could own one work of art what would it be?
Tough question. Probably one deep blue/black Rothko.
How would you describe your style?
Really difficult to answer, I prefer to feel free and to avoid definitions.
Can you tell us about your artistic process?
Well, I work with the cyanotype process. Instead of using enlarged internegatives, now a common practice in the field of antique contact-printing techniques, I directly contact-print the original negatives on really thin Chinese paper. I use everything from 35mm to 6×9 film and work on a lot of ways to change and distress both the final print or the negative. I then scan the final result at a really high resolution making the imperfections of the paper integral part of the whole work. When scanned the paper almost become a veil between the eye and image.
Is narrative important within your work?
No, I try to avoid/escape narrative as much as I can. There’s an abuse of the term storytelling especially in contemporary photography and I want to stay away from it. I have the sensation that narrative and storytelling keep images anchored to the ground, I’m much more interested in suggestions and free mental connections.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
The list is long and to explain why would take too long. But the first artists coming to my mind is Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko, Michael Borremans, Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, Schiele, Marlene Dumas, Dirk Braeckman, Katrien Blawer, Miroslav Tichy, Minor White, Aaron Siskind.
What or who inspires your art?
A lot of different things and artists but if I have to choose I would say Dirk Braeckman, Katrien Blower, Miroslav Tichy.
I love Braeckman for his rich tones, his ability to create tremendous images and suggest things from nothing.
I love Katrien Blower for her beautifully subtle work, for their really simple but at the same time hypercomplex process. Tichy well is impossible not to love him!!!
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
My studio is my home, I really don’t need a big space for the kind of work I do but I can’t hide i’d love to have a dedicated space in the future, everyday life and art practice should have their different spaces in my opinion.
Do you have any studio rituals?
I think I’m slightly OCD so everything is slightly a ritual.
What are you working on currently?
I wanted to work with video loops so I bought a 16mm Bolex camera. This is a spring-wound clockwork power system camera, this means that every charge of the spring gives approx 28 seconds of filming at 24fps. So what I’m trying to do is to work with 28 seconds black and white sequences and to cyanotype them and subsequently scan them frame per frame. Once scanned I take every frame and edit the whole sequence in editing software. It’s a really time-consuming process (a second of video is made of 24 frames) and since cyanotype is a kind of process that kills details especially when printing small 16mm frames, attention must be taken in choosing the right subject. I recently discovered after a lot of scanning the macro details must be avoided for example…
Is still a trial and error work but I will find the right way to do it.
Where can we buy your art?
I still don’t have a gallery so, in case, people can get in touch with me by the mail on my website or by Instagram.