Inez Jönsson’s practice stems from notions of limitation and consequence — an absolute structure where the few available decisions emerge unreservedly from the inherent qualities and predetermined nature of the materials she employs.
Early on, Jönsson focused on highlighting the very fundamentals of painting. Her appreciation and understanding of materials come from her own physical experience—she saws, weaves, dyes, threads, and paints each individual element. She approaches the materials, assesses them, and then unfolds and articulates what is otherwise obscured by the image. With careful, subtle disruptions, the individual materials become equal protagonists. Their former status is abandoned, transitioning into something unified, where medium becomes the ultimate goal.
Simple, repetitive patterns emerge from thin layers, blurring the boundary between closed and open form. In pitch-black works, with enigmatic titles such as Marysol or Black, Black, Potato, juxtaposed front and back layers enter a dialogue. From edge to edge, tightly stretched flax threads run across the surface, while against the matte black stretcher frame, transparent fields open like mullioned windowpanes—sometimes closed, sometimes permeable, connecting with the surrounding light and space.
In other works, transparency is meticulously evoked through the density of colour. In shades reminiscent of vegetation, clay, or ochre - a single colour shifts through varying degrees of concentration. Where the pigment is densest, the canvas is sealed and saturated, appearing elevated above the more thinly painted sections. Along the predetermined composition of the stretcher frame, the picture plane gradually emerges, like a double exposure in development.
Jönsson’s works are particularly characterized by reduction and materiality. Through the inexhaustible idiom of geometry, they oscillate teasingly between abstraction and figuration. The repeated motif of the cross, present in both the stretcher frame and the woven fabric of the canvas, becomes a focal point—at times as a logical consequence, at times applied, added as fabric upon fabric, or cut out. As a charged symbol, the works carry a moment of solemnity—shared rituals of life’s transience and sacrifice. Stripped of its religious purpose, the cross becomes a straightforward presentation of what it is—a sign; but in Jönsson’s practice, also a necessary system, through which she maps the possibilities within a constrained materiality, as painting and as object.
When Jönsson deliberately dims the seductive illusion of motif, what remains is her tangible labor—the hours spent painstakingly taming the, sometimes unruly, temperament and imperfections of the individual parts, visible yet tenderly refined in Jönsson’s hands.
