The Verdure of Night (2025)

Peter Stridsberg appears in every image himself. Dressed in the same t-shirt and jeans throughout, he resembles a paper doll, one of those bearing only basic garments, onto which other clothes are pinned. The artist’s lightly dressed figure, placed within wintry landscapes, makes me instinctively uneasy. Quite simply, it looks cold.

The viewer’s impulse to identify with the figure in the landscape harks back to the late 18th century, when art began to concern itself in earnest with humanity’s relationship to the sensory world.

At that time, artists would place figures within landscapes not to act or tell a story, but merely to perceive. The most famous example is Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, where the lone figure stands atop a cliff, gazing out over the mist-veiled expanse.

Peter Stridsberg’s world of motifs is nature. Northern, Nordic nature. All of the exhibited images depict snowy winter landscapes. Some are captured in daylight, others in the darkness of night. They share two common elements: the presence of the artist, and a switched-on portable spotlight.

As I study the images, I begin to search for kinship with older landscape painting, perhaps because somewhat carelessly I assume that Stridsberg is working within a Romantic tradition. His back-turned figure in the beautiful, desolate landscapes suggests, at first glance, a familiar idea: the human exposed to the spirit of nature. But this assumption proves to be careless.

Though the compositions do, in part, recall some of Romanticism’s most iconic works, something gradually emerges through continued engagement, qualities that diverge from what I associate clearly with the Romantic. This realization is liberating. The artist does, certainly, employ Romantic archetypes as a point of departure but interestingly, not so much to create within a tradition as to stress-test it. I find myself wondering how, exactly and eventually, I realize the answer lies in the light. Where the Romantics employed seductive effects, Peter Stridsberg instead applies a kind of factual clarity. Not that his images lack atmosphere or allure but the lighting is not theatrically arranged and calculated, as with the Romantics.

Instead, some scenes are bathed in sharp daylight, while the night scenes are lit as if we are stepping into them with a flashlight. The light source is in fact the spotlight — which also appears in the daytime images. Alongside the artist’s lightly dressed figure, it produces a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, a distancing that creates a beautiful, solemn play with the landscape motif.

Carl-Johan Olsson
Curator of 19th Century Painting
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden

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