Perfectly Flawed

Perfection is an overrated phenomenon, chased by the flawed beings. There is a remarkable depth to understand the notion behind the theory of perfection. A thing seemingly perfect to one’s eyes can be seemed as full of faults by others. The tune you find unbearable to hear can be a dose of serenity for someone else. A habit one finds repulsive can be a trait adored by another individual.

If you realize, you are always looking for perfection in things, rather than its flaws. You are drawn towards perfection while the artist is finding a romantic flair with the flaw that he or she has found in a fashionable group of the elites. He is on a quest to explore the starkness to suffice his psychic muse.

Erik Thor Sandberg is one artist who takes you on a journey of conflict and vice. His portraits represent the dark fables of human nature. There is an invariable profundity of silence that is echoing to you to find beauty in it. While looking at Sandberg’s paintings, the nature of subjects depicts a grotesque reflection of the human race and at the same time it is telling you I’m only a fallible human. This creates the stir in the viewer’s imagination when they see their inner beings on the canvas.

The nudes that he represents in his artwork does not evoke any sexual connotations rather they symbolize the very flesh and bones that we veil with a piece of cloth. The idea ‘to be comfortable with who you are and how you are‘ is also an essence he is nurturing through his work. A first glance at Sandberg’s work might unsettle you for a while, but the more time you spend with it, it grows on you. It will give you a glance to the evils of the so-called sophisticated society. His paintings have an arresting appeal to it which will haunt you like a fiend. The theatrical whim of his mysterious manifestations is associated with disaster in his oeuvre.

When you start seeing the touches of sadness, an unbound excitement stirs in you. The way you enjoy the sun sinking down and the waves slapping the shores is the way you will be enamored to be hooked by such an artwork.

Sandberg expresses the emotions in an unapologetic way and they can be vividly seen, standing out without a shy. The tension he brings forth between his subjects and viewers has traces of grudges, envies, and fears. In the painting below, an old man is gearing up the cleaver to chop off his foot. He never intends the action to take place in his paintings, but, in the viewer’s mind and imagination. The man is a master in planting an idea in the audience’s mind by piercing through their innate complexities.

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Moreover, the painting of the girl holding a rabbit in one hand that she has killed and in the other hand holding a flower or the one with the girls kissing, looked down upon with wrath by the society (symbolically represented by the lion) while it by itself is overpowering on a timid puppy (the puppy representing the repressed souls) is egotistical and pugnacious, representing a paradox, questioning your senses to sense the right and wrong doings. 

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The desire to discover the true meaning behind Sandberg’s art is a paradoxical fascination of its own kind. The symbology that he uses takes the viewers into an unbound territory. In his work, rabbits, cats, a deer all represent a symbolic meaning but the symbolic history of these animals is very rich. One can play around with it in their own perversive ways to find meanings in them. Also, he paints nude and nude is exquisite if fancied with innate eyes and smutty if merely viewed.

In my article disturbingly allure, I talked about the disturbance in the work of an artist and how it completes his paintings and Sandberg’s work is a perfect example of it. When you start seeing the touches of sadness, an unbound excitement stirs in you. The way you enjoy the sun sinking down and the waves slapping the shores is the way you will be enamored to be hooked by such an artwork.

Sandberg touches upon themes like sadism, cruelty, torture, bullying and violence in his craft. These are the issues that the societies intend to obviate for centuries but have failed to do so. He is portraying these vices through his paintings and if we look deep down, every one of us is breeding these monstrous allegorical stories and these flaws are what makes perfection so desirable to attain.

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Photos Credit: Booooooom, American Gallery and Artsy