Kristina Jansson’s “Contact” was exhibited for the first time at Milliken Gallery in Stockholm in autumn 2009. Together with its companion painting “White Office”, it formed the central works of the exhibition. Both are based on the same source image, but executed using different techniques. While “White Office” is a painting in the more traditional sense, “Contact” is an inverted photograph from an earlier stage in the development of “White Office”. In connection with the exhibition, Kristina Jansson was interviewed by Svenska Dagbladet:

“There are people in this painting; it’s been a long time since that was the case?

– Until 2003, I often painted people, but it became too much about identification. The viewers relaxed and thought – oh, it’s about them, not about me. I want to come into close contact with them. Rooms are very effective in that respect; simply entering one is a very intimate event. It is my rooms that look at you, not the other way round.

Your new work White Office is also a pornographic image.

– Pornography is the ultimate extreme of looking, and is also highly intimate. I have been interested in the empty office in a kind of 1960s Modernist style, which in turn connects it to the other works I have made. They can be likened to architectural models that were never built. Here, the office connects with the open landscape, where there is nothing to hide. And yet something extremely private, indeed intimate, is taking place there.

How do you want viewers to react?

– I set the trap, or the scene; what happens afterwards – people’s feelings and reactions – is the most interesting part. But I leave them there. Then it is difficult, as a woman, to approach a pornographic subject without it becoming a political statement. I am content to shift the gaze or the camera slightly, something that has most often been controlled by men.
[…]

You often use unconventional methods when painting. Why is that?

– I am merely a tool, and I submit to the demands made by each individual painting. One of my images was painted using cleaning implements, while its negative was created with a whisker brush, a process that took four months. I have painted some images upside down, and scraped and dripped paint onto others.”

Interview by Erica Treijs, 14 October 2009.