Joakim Eneroth: Swedish Red: Swedisch Red - Hardcover

Joakim Eneroth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3865216137 ISBN 13: 9783865216137

Publisher: Steidl, 2013

Synopsis

What is the world coming to? Well, if you ask Joakim Eneroth the answer is bleak at best. He captures our growing fear, isolation and lack of trust in a series of images that at first strikes you as common and plain. But under the surface and beyond the first glance, you sense strange and highly neurotic vibrations. The naïve struggle for increased security and comfort portayed in these images are either humorous or disturbing. In Swedish Red, Eneroth examines the idea of the home as a perfect place, where life is totaly comfortable and secure, how fear, or the need for security, easily evolves into deep isolation. The images tempt us, and tell us to mind our own business at the same time. Joakim Eneroth was born in 1969 and is based in Stockholm. His works are included in such collections as Tate Modern (London), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), The Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Houston Museum of Fine Art (Houston), Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas), MEP (Paris) and more. Eneroth received the prize Prix Voies Off in Arles in 2005. Swedish Red has been exhibithed in Paris, London, Berlin, Dallas, Stockholm, among other places.

About this title

Review

Steidl is one of the great art book publishers. As seen in the 2010 documentary How to Make a Book with Steidl, Gerhard Steidl takes exquisite care to supervise each step of the process, from artist to print shop. So you might be surprised to learn that the simple but obscure images made by Joakim Eneroth for Swedish Red is available for sale online at Wal-Mart. Maybe IKEA, but Wal-Mart?

But it makes sense.

There's a list of numbers across from the title page of Eneroth'sSwedish Red. Are they catalogue numbers? Of what? There's only a brief explanatory text included in the book: "The idea of a place where everything should be perfect easily becomes a naive projection. Our craving for private security easily turns into numb isolation." The text is repeated, splashed across the hardbound cover as well as inside the slim tome. On the surface, this repetition is superfluous, even wasteful. But it's part of the repetitive, numbing nature of Eneroth's unassuming images.

Eneroth photographed examples of a barn-like Swedish house design, documented in a way that recalls the Typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Their deadpan cataloguing of German industrial structures informs Eneroth's dry approach, but the text suggests something more sinister, and in fact I wish the text had been omitted in order to leave the interpretation up to the viewer.

Those cryptic numbers? They're from the Swedish color system, Nordic swatches of domestic design. S1095-Y80R is one of 25 codes listed for varieties of Swedish Red. It's a conceptual, distancing way of communicating color and aesthetics, much as the images are cold and dry. But even though these numbers reflect the commercialization of color and aesthetics - Wal-Mart art - the pictures work on multiple levels.

Eneroth's brief statement of purpose focuses on the isolation conveyed by these perfect, standardized structures. But Eneroth's straight-ahead compositions, despite the intention to reveal a forbidding culture of security, have a dignity that elevates them. The shades of red - however much they may signify "Stop! Stay away!" - are bright and beautiful, and evoke an alternate "naive projection": red means danger, alarm, yes, but it also means apples and candy.

You can see this conflict at work in compositions where lush hedge work frames the red structures. The green and red, stop-and-go color scheme is a classic one, defining the central motifs of Alfred Hitchcock'sVertigo. The red is standoffish, but the hedges are inviting, leading the eye naturally along the edges of the frame and the asymmetrical forms of branches playing against tiff parallel lines, man and nature in opposition but also in harmony.

Paranoia can be beautiful.

Subtle variations affect composition, and the book is sequenced so the final images offer the most dramatic variations of all: snow. Here, Swedish Red is no longer the choice of a conformist, but of an artist, the red houses boldly standing out in the middle of an open white landscape, forming abstract color fields ready to photograph. The colors and forms of nature: twilight, snow, greenery, all these work against the window-less, isolating reds, revealing details that are not exactly personal but make distinctions as subtle as catalogue numbers.

Swedish Red is disarmingly simple, its images pretty and plain at the same time. You could no go further than the surface pleasures of color and composition and find in them a quiet beauty. And then forget about them. At what point does our response to abstraction become projection? Eneroth projects his own valid intentions into his sequence and presentation. But the work is strong and evocative enough to sustain multiple interpretations, like a good work of art should.

Spectrum Culture Magazine November 3rd. 2013, Pat Padua

About this edition

• Publisher: Steidl
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 3865216137
• ISBN 13: 9783865216137
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 48