…. Jan Liljeqvist’s exhibition … is a series of drawings in charcoal: landscapes, streets, walls, lonely people. A challenging world in black and white with the same bare tension as in a movie made by Robert Bresson (”A Human Refugee Sentenced to Death”). Jan Liljeqvist visualizes the moral conflict with sudden light rays, slow detonations in a dark abandoned universe. But as in the work of Master Eckhart, it is not a separation of perception or dialecticism. The mystery sees reality as a process, a light flow, both alive and destructive. Human existence in this drama is double: she is alone but participates simultaneously. Just as poor and boundless as God Himself according to Master Eckhart: a shadow of shadows. And when observing these black drawings, it feels like some kind of spiritual exercise. We do not get the meaning of them, but I think the purpose is to make us empty and free.

Jan Håfström (one of the leading art critics in Sweden) for Dagens Nyheter.

 

Black and white fascinates Jan Liljeqvist. He creates a nocturnal world where light and shadow come together in a mysterious union, using the whiteness of the paper to light the deep darkness. Barely definable threatening objects, dark roads leading to engulfing black openings and holes, trees as flaming torches, sometimes as crosses… Everything has a strange charge.
It is a wonder what can be done with a piece of charcoal or graphite and a white paper.

Lars-Erik Selin in Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm.

 

….Breathless do I run to the next exhibition, the charcoal drawings of Jan Liljeqvist. Here I am completely nailed to the floor. It is a physical adventure to come from…..(another artist mentioned in this review) to Liljeqvist. His drawings force me to slow down, to contemplate. They are as heavy as the smith’s anvil. At the same time they are vibrating, a surging of fire and flames. Or as still as a sudden silent night, when your beliefs yield and slowly disappear.
In these eighteen drawings just four persons are shown: alone of course, in the underground or in a telephone box. They inhabit the bitter hours before dawn and you get a notion of Francis Bacon in the pictures. But he disappears very quickly…Liljeqvist shows unidentified threats, not represented in human beings but in shadows. You see the shadow of a stone, just the shadow not the stone.
You can hear a sound from a ventilator, flames appear through the bars; a tree is on fire; the flames from the northern light are gathered together in a black hole; a white flower turns around like a hard and sharp propeller. It is the white surface that is dangerous, not the black one. The black surface is peaceful.
A sound seems to come from the charcoal and the white flame. A shrill dissonance like the braking of an underground train. But there is silence, a shrill silence.

Agneta Klingspor in Expressen, Stockholm.