Meet Me When the Shadows Are Longest

Absorption implies a state of complete presence, an engagement so immersive that multiple registers of time exist at once. A linear sense of time unravels in such a space, heeding instead to the flux of sensation, memory, and expectation. “The pure present,” as philosopher Henri Bergson writes, “is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” The paintings in Meet Me When the Shadows Are Longest, Aneta Kajzer’s first solo exhibition in Sweden, evoke a comparable sense of immersion in their articulation of time as a circuitous, shifting realm spanning lived experience, dreams, and popular culture. Rendered in bold layers of luminous color, Aneta Kajzer’s paintings arise through an intuitive process in which she works the canvas from all possible angles, beginning with brush strokes, streaks, and drips that gradually give shape to an evocative image-world. Kajzer’s work attests to her insatiable curiosity. She bends time-periods, genre, and artistic methodologies to craft a conceptual and pictorial universe that is as immersive as it is idiosyncratic: a world that seamlessly shifts between abstraction and figuration, form and void, movement and stillness. A commonality that links many of her paintings is their elusiveness. Abstract marks give way to the hint of a face, a nose, an eye. These shadowy figures seem on the brink of emerging from—or dissolving into—their backgrounds. The topsy-turvy orientation of her works leaves room for discovery from all angles, a mark that suggests a particular shape from one perspective might reveal itself to be a phantasmal set of eyes from another. Soft traces of a profile, a nose, an eye, or a mouth recede into sinuous undulating lines evoking landscape. Kajzer’s masterful manipulation of varying viscosities and textures of paint imbues her work with a hazy, otherworldly, dreamlike atmosphere. In Behind the Mountains, dense layers of ultramarine, purple, and white give way to more loosely rendered shades of lilac and umber that seem to fade into a translucent stain on the righthand side of the canvas—as if this landscape-body was staging its own disappearence. In Pollinator, green tendrils extend from the bottom left corner against a soft yellow backdrop, while swirling lines of purple emerge from a salmon-colored field at the top of the canvas. Between these two visual poles, a pale pink coil hovers ambiguously, evoking both an abstracted tulip and a vaguely human face. The work invites the viewer to move between different readings of the image, with forms that reveal themselves and recede, as if shifting in response to perception. This dynamic, spontaneous approach embraces chance while maintaining a conscious, embodied structure—a sentiment that is mirrored in the exhibition’s title, which evokes an encounter in time attuned to the rhythms of the body, the power of the imagination, and the whims of nature. Meet Me When the Shadows Are Longest can therefore be understood as an invitation, not to a particular place or a specific time, but to a sensibility—an openness to discovery.