All down Hill is a two-sided title. It both implies some kind of come-down, anda t the same time points to the famous Swedish artist Carl Frederick Hill (1849-1911) whose destiny is a brick in the classic tale of the artist who digs so deep into himself that he finally cannot find his way back, and thus has lost all connection to the surrounding world.
Alone, observing treetops, stretched out on a carpet of moss, face turned upwards to the kaleidoscope of sunbeams through the branches, slowly diving into her own absence, hovering above the world in order to flee the torments of her memory, she sees: the breathtaking trees go all the way to the sky to take root, like those of Rodney Graham, upside-down, and she feels: the diffuse atmosphere falling into nature’s chaos. From the perspective of a working drawing, Judit Ström has traced the lines of a dying universe. By mapping out the concentric network of her sensitive relationship with it, opening up the way of emotion, she obtains unsettling drawings (developed sometimes by assembling scattered fragments), where the figure (a self-portrait) is positioned right at the centre of a mael-ström of coloured, stylised, graphic forms, a clear expression of being above the materiality of things and of its enigmatic character, the equilibrium point of all the tensions that surround it but do not engulf it. One’s gaze fixes on this solitary, as if indifferent figure, whilst the landscape swirls around it: figure of the artist in the heart of and at the same time isolated from the world’s convulsions, as if in the eye of a typhoon. B.Z.
