The proponents of the early avant-garde did not want to know too much about painting in past centuries – they were too busy ridding themselves of the traditional shackles of conventions, genres and clichés. It was only looking back from a distance and possibly after a certain fatigue had set in that the value of previous epochs could regain its attraction. Matts Leiderstam has at any rate made it his task to explore what is today seen as the enormous subtlety of certain old masters, without falling into an over-enthusiastic nostalgia.
His approach is governed both by art-historical methodology and a direct, sensual reception of the effect of historical paintings. His explicit preoccupation with homosexual motifs, which Leiderstam explores with subtle interest, is the critical point of reference, although – in order to emphasise the scientific approach – he employs technical aids such as magnifying glasses, telescopes and X-ray photographs. The discoveries he makes – for example, associated flows of semen or orgiastic volcanic eruptions – may be striking. But what may be more important here is that a trail is taken up, with demonstrative passion, whose latent meaning otherwise often remains only secondary. To make this by no means lesser aspect completely clear, Leiderstam makes a very concrete connection between »picturesque« landscapes and meeting places for homosexuals, which are also situated, as a general rule, in picturesque places. A particularly prominent example of this is the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris with its artificial grotto, of which a painting by Nicolas Poussin exists. Leiderstam copied the painting and brought it back to the original scene, which is considered particularly disreputable among homosexuals (»Enter at your own risk«) – a good example for the way a sub-culture appropriates its romantic uncanniness.
In the case of the other motifs that he notices during his research in catalogues, Leiderstam is also not content with a mere culturo-critical interpretation, but goes to the originals and even makes copies in a completely traditional manner to get closer to their emotional content. His comprehensive project »Grand Tour«, which he has been working on for ten years already, brings together a number of such objects of study. On large tables, catalogues are spread out that allow, for example, colour comparisons between different reproductions of the same original. The point of this lies however in the fact that the influence of colour nuances on the conveyed atmospheres was already intensively reflected by the painters of the picturesque landscapes, and not just since the era of offset printing. At flea markets, Leiderstam even found the handbag-sized fans with colour filters that were formerly used to test landscapes for their different possibilities as artistic subjects.
The idyllic was thus always a construct, and it was always familiar to its producers as such, at least in practice. It is therefore also not clear at all which era can feel itself superior to the other. Here, it should of course not be overlooked that the occupation with art back then was reserved for only a small elite, in whose footsteps mass tourism today, for example, can only dream of similarly intensive experiences. We may have more comfortable vehicles, but we perhaps have less staying power where subtleties and undertones are concerned. Leiderstam attempts to breach a gap when he, as happened a few years ago in Munich, asks a young artist to sit every day a month long for an hour in front of the self-portrait of a (bearded) painter and not to shave off his own beard during this time. Here, too, it is probably not a matter of returning to Romantic enthusiasm or a pseudo-scientific experiment, but a planned escape from everyday habits with their relative ignorance of too powerful feelings. Whether this escape can be planned, and whether the aestheticisation of an art-historical research project is sufficient, is a matter for doubt. But in the end, the main aim is to construct ideal spaces and opportunities in which a free emotional life moves into reachable proximity.
Translated by Timothy Jones