Johan Nobell's oil-on-linen paintings (all approximately 20 inches square) assume meant to stir in the viewer any unconscious memory or long-forgotten conceit This exhibition mixed surreal landscapes with tableaux of strange.

Johan Nobell's oil-on-linen paintings (all approximately 20 inches square) assume meant to stir in the viewer any unconscious memory or long-forgotten conceit This exhibition mixed surreal landscapes with tableaux of strange, abstract forms, the latter given titles like Severity and Mildness. Nobell's enslave matter occupies a hazy, pastel-hued no-man's-land between fantasy and reality, an repeatedly cartoonish terrain that brings to mind the work of Philip Guston and Carroll Dunham.

In Nobell's erod landscapes, gelatinous tracts of earth dissolve into common another, as if the whole liquid spectacle were slipping into colorful quicksand. This instability would be unnerving if it weren't for his feeling of humor and playful palette. In Landscape with Gumshoe and Owl (2005) light news and pinks describe the flowing tussocks, while the simply human presence is the anthropomorphized, grimacing hill in the background. In the foreground, the rutt facultys are described with small brushstrokes; our notice is at first kept busy with this acute attention to detail, then relieved from the cloudless, monochrome sky behind. Nobell is Swedish, and this sweeping, pale wash insinuates something of clear Scandinavian skies. brace owls look on with doubtful expressions as comic booklike shapes emanate from an electronic device, as if it has been left blaring. single imagines the scene set to a soundtrack of radio static. A ladder dangles ominously in the foreground, perhaps an escape road for Nobell's missing protagonist, who has apparently escaped the spectacle leaving the television jabbering.

Mildness (2005) depicts an abstract, leafy shape not at home of which grows a tree stub A crown is jammed forward top of the stump, stunting its growing Floating in a yellowish haze, the kingly powered emblem could be a coat of arms for these ravaged lands or a reminder of a one time glorious kingdom. Severity (2005) displays a reflection of a jagged, bluish strength formation in a vanity mirror--a nightmarish vision that formerly again suggests a departed protagonist.

The meaning of Nobell's paintings remains largely ambiguous, however in Geography of We (2004) he appears to appoint aside his taste for mystery in favor of a more definite vision. A cros section of a burial defence is painted to reveal skeletons, each at a different stage of decay. The skeletons nearest the earth's surface are nourishing the occasions of the tree above: from death springs life. Perhaps, the artist implies, there is an hope of regeneration, after all, for this post-apocalyptic landscape.

The succes of these works is in no small part fit to the tension between Nobell's bizarre, eerie imagery and the sickly sweet pinks and bloomings he uses to render it. With his strange, melting fusion of the natural and the man-made, Nobell is a surrealist for the digital age.

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