The gallery Laurent Godin presents Henrik Samuelsson second solo show "A Summer of Sorts for Broken Painters".

Born in 1960, Henrik Samuelsson lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Recipient of the Carnegie Art Award 2005, he has recently exhibited at Färgfabriken, Stockholm (2005), the Royal College of Art, London, GB - the Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, IS - the Centre International d'art contemporain, Château de Carros, Nice, FR - the Meilahti Art Museum, Helsingfors, FI - the Konstakademien, Stockholm, SE - the Henie Onstads Kunstsenter, Oslo, NO (2005-2007) Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris - Surréalités, CentrePasquArt, Biel, CH(2007), Teleport Färgfabriken, Färgfabriken Norr, Östersund, SE (2008)...

"Time has been transformed. Into a summer of sorts for broken painters. We know that now. Because that is what Henrik Samuelsson claims with his new exhibition in Paris. He thereby appears to have a certain faith in the state of things. Painter he is. And he and his world - or language - may have been broken once. But he is broken no longer. Because now he is on the other side, in that space of freedom that opens up when the battle has already been fought. By those who fight such battles. It is not for nothing that Marcel Duchamp is an important piece of the puzzle of Henrik Samuelsson's work. Like Duchamp was, Samuelsson is more concerned with creating a space of freedom in which to establish something utterly his own, than with clashing with others.

But then Samuelsson has entered Duchamp's world more tangibly than most. He has not just been inspired by Duchamp's ideas and his ability to shift the focus in and of art. Samuelsson also knows Duchamp's craftsmanship, down to the smallest engraving - all that which is so easily forgotten. Samuelsson was involved in making the replica of The Large Glass that some hold to be the best. Samuelsson knows that the meticulous hand can allow the mind - and art - to soar.

That is why Henrik Samuelsson himself has become a precise craftsman of soaring. Step by step, he has constructed his own alphabet, which he controls down to particle level. This control, though, is in order to release a language whose building blocks may be familiar spaces and landscapes, but from which he has built a peculiar logic that is his and no-one else's. And which therefore is both natural and obvious for him. For the rest of us, it is a world to step into.

Henrik Samuelsson builds a reality which really is both This and That, both interior and exterior, both light and dark. And that is why it is a summer for broken painters. It takes art to a new space. Which is a summer of freedom where precise technique creates a natural lightness of hand. It is a summer that allows a diptych really to become two parallel worlds, two worlds which resemble each other but never meet.

Henrik Samuelsson never leaves and will never leave his childhood village in northern Sweden. It is the backdrop where he first felt alien, then decided to become an artist, and from which he finally fled, like Joyce fled Dublin. That is why, like Joyce, he can never cast off his origins. He can just people them with new lessons, new elements which, layer by layer, create a logic utterly his own.

Now his home haunts meet a school of architecture outside Paris. And a disintegrating industrial landscape. Or monochromes that play with Mondrian - or play with contemporary minimalist design. It is This and it is That. It is Leda and the Swan. All of it created from Samuelsson's own chronology, as natural for him as the seasons are for the rest of us. To the depopulation region were added Duchamp, then Brian Eno and now friends cleaning up, and floating swans.

He who succeeds in tearing a rent in the parasol opens up another space. Which allows, as Deleuze has pointed out, chaos to seep in. A chaos which in turn allows us to see our own seeing in a new light.

It is a space in which there has been a summer of sorts for broken painters. It is the space that Henrik Samuelsson has created."

Jan Åman Jan Åman is director of the Färgfabriken, Stockholm (translated by Tomas Tranæus)