Artist
Viktor Mattsson
Born 1988 in Umeå, lives and works in Antwerp
Viktor Mattsson paints in oil and draws, building troubled figures with distorted anatomies and using archetypes such as cowboys, clowns, devils and angels to stage the struggle between good and bad decisions. His characters drink, brood and fight; wine glasses tempt them towards fleeting pleasures, while butterflies and flowers stand for innocence and calm. Mattsson sets joy against sorrow and humour against melancholy, and his awkward, comic style brings both sentiment and satire to questions of masculinity and moral weakness. He often paints in thin layers over textured surfaces, and in recent paintings limits his palette to ultramarine blue, neutral tint and titanium white. Personal feeling is the starting point, but the pictures are built from symbolic elements before realism, in the spirit of Fra Angelico and the self-taught Swedish painter Victoria Nygren, and his earlier work as a tattooist shaped how he thinks about images.
