IN THE BLAZING SHADOW OF FROZEN PASSION
– ON THE ART OF MAYA EIZIN ÖIJER –
Lars O. Ericsson
art critic and curator
The UNREADABILITY of this world. Everything duplicated. Paul Celan
— From the mid-1980s Maya also began to combine fragments of paintings, silkscreen prints and photographs. Significantly enough, a large work from 1986 is called Borderline. This development leads gradually to the two series Vanitas and Continence (1988), with which she finally established herself as a leading name jn Nordic contemporary art.
As something of a deconstructivist avant la lettre (at least in the Swedish context) Maya was an outsider, even to her own generation. It was only with the breakthrough of Postmodernism in the 1980s that a climate – artistic, public and critical – arose which made it possible for her category-subverting art to burst into full bloom and win the recognition she deserved. —
— For me, Maya´s works are to the eye what Mahler´s music is to the ear. With both, the harmony, idyll and joy are stretched across an abyss of disintegration, melancholy and terror. With both, the sweetness of the harmony is broken down into its inharmonious opposite, at the precise moment when they threaten to flatten out into saccharine banality. For Maya, the Arcadia in Et In Arcadia Ego is not just a personal idyll. As in a “horror film” (the term is Maya´s own) or in a film by Hitchcock, the delightful, pastoral setting is gradually transformed into a scene of death and terror. —