Somewhere along the axes between familiar and foreign, between object and image, idea and
form; between the work of Richard Artschwager and Jasper Johns, is located a zone in which
David Svensson creates. Like Duchamp, he manages to keep opposing options open and
operational: paintings exist as compelling and beautiful forms; they refract and reflect, offering
fresh glimpses of both new and known spaces. Svensson’s three-dimensional works hold the
capacity to change, to respond; they invite our physical interaction with them.
They illuminate our understanding of a world we take for granted and they suggest an imagined
realm. Solving the conundrum of twentieth-century painters, support, image and medium, in his
woven paintings, conflate; image and process are literally fused.
Moving beyond the concerns of sculptors of the last century, life and living are the platforms for
his three-dimensional works.
Comforted by the familiarity of this work, its forms, allusions, the functions it suggests, we are
drawn into a place where assumption and history hold no sway, where we become explorers,
participants, navigators.

Judith Hoos Fox, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign