Blaise Reutersward – Portraits of the Inner World The Cansalas Gallery & Art House Exhibition- Place Vendôme The art of Blaise Reutersward (b. 1961, Sweden) may appear dark at first glance, but look again, and you will find his works are looking back at you. They stir emotions, confronting us with something raw and unfiltered. We are asked to pause, feel, and stay with them to reflect rather than retreat. It is an invitation to be present with ourselves and to open a door to feelings we often keep hidden. Blaise’s work doesn’t simply depict darkness; it surfaces what already lives within us, reminding that art, at its best, draws us inward and creates a quiet, transformative space. His mixed media paintings hum with a raw, emotional current. What at first seems abstract slowly reveals deeply human expressions: large-headed figures and faces that emerge from the paintings, drawing you in. His practice is both intimate and confrontational. The exhibition title, Place Vendôme, comes from a curious question the artist once asked himself while sitting in the famed Parisian square: “Why are there no pigeons at Place Vendôme?” It’s a deceptively simple observation, one that hints at restraint, order, and the quiet absence of the everyday. Like much of Reutersward’s work, it draws attention to what often goes unnoticed, inviting us to look again and more closely. The layered surfaces shift between abstraction and figuration, echoing the expressive intensity of Art Brut, the raw immediacy of Jean Dubuffet and Gaston Chaissac, and the psychological depth of Edvard Munch and Käthe Kollwitz. There are also echoes of Francis Bacon, who sought to paint the “brutality of fact.” Like Bacon, Reutersward suspends his figures in ambiguous space, resisting narrative in favour of emotional force. Yet Blaise´s voice remains distinct—unfiltered, direct, and deeply invested in the search for inner truth. His choice of unusual blend of natural materials adds a further emotional and symbolic charge. Kraft paper, humble and industrial, offers a soft, absorbent surface that evokes skin, soil, or aged memory. It accepts every mark and stain without resistance. Wine and coffee leave behind unpredictable traces, tied to the rhythms of everyday life, solitude, and reflection. Charcoal, oil, and ink create a tension between softness and precision, presence and erasure. Charcoal can be smudged away; oil lingers with density; ink commits immediately. This interplay mirrors the emotional shifts within the work—uncertainty, assertion, vulnerability, control. This emotional immediacy may be better understood through his biography. Before turning to painting, Blaise Reutersward spent 22 years in Paris, where he had a successful career as a beauty photographer, working with Vogue, Hermès, and the fashion industry. There, he was once described as “a Viking who met a sophisticated Paris.” His lens was drawn to perfection and glamour. Life circumstances eventually brought him back to Stockholm, the city where he was born, and from there he moved toward a more poetic photographic language. But it was following his long recovery from Lyme disease and a move to Mallorca that a deeper transformation began. Drawing became a new focus, sharpening his gaze and grounding him in the present. With this came freedom—from artifice, from expectation—and the rediscovery of joy in the process of creating. What is more, his relocation to Mallorca could be read as an artist-in-exile moment. Like Robert Graves and Joan Miró, who also came to the island to rediscover inner space and begin again. The landscape, slower pace, and distance from former roles provided fertile ground for reinvention. For Blaise, the studio becomes a kind of sanctuary, where each work is part of an ongoing search rather than a fixed statement, like shifting notions of masculinity, that he likes to explore. An identity in motion, that is neither rigid nor defined, but fragile, searching, and emotionally present. His practice, like masculinity itself, is layered and evolving. There is no detachment here, only closeness and a need to connect. The result is a process that feels lived-in and honest, deeply rooted in the physical act of making. It recalls art as catharsis, drawing not as composition, but as release. A direct transition of thought and feeling, linking his practice to traditions of art therapy or automatism, where the unconscious leads. These are not images constructed in theory, but drawn out of the body, through hand, breath, and intuition. Reutersward invites us to come closer. His work doesn’t ask to be understood in a traditional sense; it asks to be felt. And once felt, it lingers. These are works that reward quiet attention, opening space for what is new, unexpected, and quietly transformative—like noticing the absence of pigeons in a grand square, and wondering what that absence might mean.