Jens Froberg: space, time, matter, energy
Viewing Jens Froberg’ paintings can be laborious, enjoyable, mediative, arduous, tranquil, strange etc. The more you see: hidden and buried hues, washes wiped and reapplied, traces of lines mostly done away with, the more you also don’t.
Jens Froberg, who splits his time between Austria and his native Sweden, walks fifty-five minutes from his apartment in Vienna to his studio and fifty-five minutes back home at night, most often in silence. In his studio he spends hours, once again predominantly in silence, adding and taking away layers of oil paint on small obsessively hued canvases using brushes and, more importantly, time.
Like walking for any amount of time (let alone an hour), viewing the artist’s paintings can be laborious, enjoyable, mediative, arduous, tranquil, strange, etc. The more you see: hidden and buried hues, washes wiped and reapplied, traces of lines mostly done away with, the more you also don’t. The palettes favor muted earth tones and assertive pastels and the subject matters remain aloof if not entirely resistant. Sometimes there are geometries, allusions to structures that are merely implied, cognitive associations with very little evidence or explanation but above and without fail there are meaty cemented color fields, dense, and vibrant and persistently and layered.
Since his paintings are for the most part stretched (a pun) across three different series: Setting a Good Corner, Still Life, and Light On a Monochrome, I thought it could be helpful to approach the text in the same way, shedding light on each body of work while addressing an element of the artist’s practice as a whole.
Still Life.
Although there aren’t many immediately discernible differences separating each body of work from the other–––after all they are mostly all densely painted color fields roughly around the same size…the more time you spend with the work the clearer the differences become. For instance, whether it can be credited to their subtle horizontal bands that conjure ideas of tablescapes or the uncanny power of associative thought and titles, the paintings titled Still Life, actually do begin to feel like still lives despite the fact that there is nothing remotely representational about them.
After attending an exhibition of the work of William Scott and discovering that both Scott’s and Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings could actually be considered color fields had their subjects been stripped of their outlines, the artist began the series as an experiment: attempting to paint a still life without featuring any of the objects. Whereas the paintings titled Setting a Good Corner are maybe the most directly architectural, those of Still Life are moody, descriptive, almost narrative… what the viewer has in these paintings are suggestions of light, shadow, form, even if the artist has gone out of his way to avoid referencing any source image at all.
Setting a Good Corner.
Titled after a video work by American sculptor, performance artist and ranch-hand/cowboy Bruce Nauman, the paintings of this series most often feature allusions to structures, hinting towards the idea of frames and/or framing devices. In Nauman’s video we see him building and setting up a corner to eventually hang a fence; in Froberg’s paintings we see sections of color occasionally being corralled and delineated by line.
Considering himself a slow learner, averse to deadlines, Jens has worked on some paintings over years, shifting and pivoting constantly. The paintings of Setting a Corner imply a series of concentrated decision making. Although the video was just a point of inspiration, what maintains between Nauman’s work and the paintings of Froberg is a commitment and exploration of the methodical and flirtatious relationship between a painting, which could be a metaphor for a terrain, an idea, or even creativity as a whole, and its demarcations and edges.
Light On.
Possibly the most aloof of Jens’ practice, the Light On paintings reflect what may be at the core of his work: color, mood, temperature, climate, decision and restraint. In Vienna, where the artist has lived since 2012, it can get hot in the summer so the artist has begun returning to Malmö, painting during the season in a studio he has set up there. As the artist has figured out a way of adapting to his environment, it could be said that so too has his paintings. When discussing his palette across of all his works, Jens and I wondered if there was something deeply Scandinavian about its origins, with me bringing up the work of 17th century Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi and him later circling back to eventually cite Evert Lundquist as a massive figure in Swedish painting history. Other influences of the artist: Åke Göransson, Torsten Andersson, Carl Fredrik Hill, Eve Eriksson, and Bo Trankell – a painter of frantic hazy landscapes. As a committed abstract painter – who confessed that he always wanted to paint but early on struggled with deciding on what exactly to paint, it would make sense that most of these influences would be predominately figurative.
The magic of Jens’ paintings is their priority in understanding where colors live: in life. Whether as the background and settings of nonexistent tablescapes (Still Life), imaginal sections and their even more fictive guard posts (Setting a Good Corner), or as occasional fecund terrains rife for exploration (Light on a Monochrome).
Like walking a trail in a heavily wooded under-funded public park, with Jens’ paintings it is often very hard to know where you will end up. Like Jens in the morning on the way to his studio, weaving and dodging the traffic of cosmopolitan Vienna, perhaps the most inspiring part of all is actually the journey there.
Editor’s note: Justin Chance is a New York City-based artist. Samantha Ozer wrote about him for CFA here.
March 12, 2025
