Photo by Malin Bengts
My work begins with something small — a word, a sentence, a mark — and asks how little is needed for it to still carry weight.
Sometimes that means leaving a single word alone. Sometimes it means repeating it until it wears out. A word said once can hold its whole meaning; said fifty times, it stops sounding like language and becomes rhythm and shape. A line is a line. A thousand of them stop being lines and become weather, a field, a surface. Held long enough, a word stops being read and starts being watched.
I work in two directions and keep them apart.
In one, the hand is left in. Nothing is corrected. The pressure shifts, the letters drift, the line thickens where the hand slows. That record of the making is as much the work as the word itself.
In the other, the hand is taken out. The letterform is fixed, the margin is fixed, the colour is specified rather than chosen. Often the language isn't mine either: sentences taken as they stand from documents written to be read once and filed. What's left is the word, flat and at full size, with nothing to look at but what it says.
The two contradict each other, and I keep both for that reason. One asks what a mark carries when a person is behind it. The other asks what it carries when no one is.
Minimalism, to me, isn't about having less to look at. It's about trusting one small unit enough to let it carry the whole piece once everything else is stripped away.
Bio
Johnny Ramstedt has exhibited internationally since 1999, including Volta Art Fair Basel and group exhibitions in Miami, New York, and London. His work is held in private and corporate collections in Finland and internationally.
For inquiries: jr@johnnyramstedt.com