“ALL OF US” by Johan Wahlstrom

Johan Wahlstrom’s new figurative paintings bring us face to face with something at once familiar and elusive: ourselves.

For more than a decade, Wahlstrom has developed a distinctive visual language in which expressive faces, charged color pigments and densely worked surfaces transform the atmosphere of contemporary life into painting. His work has been exhibited internationally, from New York, Chicago and Oslo to London, Dubai, Madrid and Marbella, and is held in museum, institutional and private collections across Europe and the United States. 

Yet “All of Us” brings the conversation closer to home. Here, the individual face becomes a point of entry into the larger, often contradictory experience of being human.

These paintings are not portraits in the traditional sense. Rather, they are encounters. Faces appear, shift and emerge through layers of color and gesture, carrying traces of humour, tension, vulnerability, confidence and uncertainty. They seem to belong to particular people, while remaining open enough for us to recognize something of ourselves within them.

Wahlstrom’s background in music remains present in the rhythm of his compositions. Color moves like sound; lines interrupt and overlap; dense passages give way to moments of visual silence. His characteristic sense of alienation is still there, but in this new figurative body of work it feels more intimate than distant. The figures are not simply observers of the world, instead, they are participants in it.

“All of Us” continues Wahlstrom’s longstanding interest in the psychological landscape of our time, while allowing the human figure to take centre stage. These are paintings about people, but also about recognition: the fleeting moment when an unfamiliar face begins to feel strangely known. In that sense, “All of Us” is precisely what its title suggests. It is not about one person, one story or one point of view. It is about the shared, complicated and wonderfully imperfect condition of being human.

by Eleazar Sanchez

Artist Statement.

“I see myself as a “post-post-modernist” playful painter of truth, exploring the psychological and spiritual toll of some of the most pressing social, economic, and political issues in our society. In our ever-accelerating media cycle, we process vast amounts of textual information daily, but often it is an iconic image that endures. For every crisis, triumph, and political intrigue, there is often an image that puts a human face to the news, capturing our empathy and becoming shorthand for the event itself. Faces serve as a barometer of the news — how we should respond, how we should feel, how much we should care — they symbolize the times and political systems that we live in, to human monstrosities and their conflicts for dominance. My paintings explore both our emotional entanglements with current events and the space these images hold in how we collectively understand them. I draw my inspiration from my previous career in music, reflected in the use of layered density of color and composition. I work to keep a constant feeling of alienation in my paintings, which in tandem with my color palette connects to a long history of a gloomy and mysterious aesthetic from the Northern Hemisphere.”