Text written by Joline Uvman

In Julia Sjölin's work, femininity looms large. And as impossible as femininity may feel, just as impossible Sjölin's work can be perceived at first glance.

In Sjölin's studio, large paintings lie on the floor. The motifs are abstract and elusive, repelling. The colors seem both too gray and too bright at the same time. The brushstrokes are in many thick layers, thin and thick in turn. They seem to be painted in the moment without much thought - more like a whim.

So in contrast to these smeary paintings are her vigilant moving image works. There, the smear is replaced by clear motifs; female figures that are viewed and recorded by Sjölin through the camera lens. The pace is slow but often broken up into several simultaneous clips.

It is when the paintings and video works are juxtaposed that the feeling of impossibility arises. The viewer is therefore required to be both attentive and persistent - for it is in the contrasts and contradictions that we can bring clarity to where Sjölin herself is and on what premises her work exists.

(Did any artist ever paint the Virgin at night?)
"All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass"

In the poem "NY at Night", Julia Sjölin asks the hypothetical question of whether the Virgin has ever been painted at night. She follows up with a line from Mina Loy's poem "Magasins du Louvre": All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass. It is around the gaze that Sjölin's work is centered.

The camera is Julia Sjölin's eye and the canvas her body. Over time, the work opens up and the flat surfaces - the canvas - the screen - become a landscape where the section, with Sjölin herself as a kind of center, alternates between looking and being looked at. As the lens stubbornly follows the female figures in the image, she also allows herself to be revealed in the painting. It is a generous act and a clever move. In a single act - the change of medium - Sjölin points to the complexity of existing simultaneously as object and subject. It all rounds off and reaches a mystical peak when the camera zooms in from the heights down to earth, towards the darkened landscape illuminated by the city lights. There she lies, the glittering cityscape, always available for the projection of others.

There is a method that recurs in Julia Sjölin's work: cutting and clipping. The large paintings on the floor will be cut into smaller sections. The film medium is treated in a similar way, where different clips are joined together, thus reinforcing the feeling that we are looking at something cropped. By extension, if the canvas is a body and the camera an eye, we have here something that bleeds.

Julia, who is also my friend, sends me a print screen with a paragraph quoting the writer Clarice Lispector. A kind of mirroring occurs as I read:

"Every book is blood," Lispector writes in, A Breath of Life. "It's pus, it's excrement, it's heart torn to shreds, it's nerves cut to pieces, it's electric shock, it's coagulated blood running like boiling lava down the mountain."

Julia Sjölin's work is not impossible, it is all that, works that blow themselves up in an attempt to reveal something that is in fact impossible - the being of the female body beyond the attributed femininity.