Soldered brass, 12 x 12 x 3, 2016.
Swedish Fantasy is built from two concentric images of one country. The rim is a ring of twelve compartments packed with relief: architecture, crowds, streets. That is the format of the commemorative plate, which reduces a place to a sequence of views. The well at the center holds the other thing a country becomes for a foreign imagination. “Swedish” has long carried an erotic expectation abroad, and the title names that projection as fantasy. The place as sold occupies the rim, and the place as desired occupies the center.
The two registers differ in depth. The rim scenes are shallow and flattened, readable only as pictures. The embracing couple stands nearly in the round and clear of the dish, as the side view shows, with the wings and key projecting further still. Reality is rendered as image, and the fantasy alone gets volume. The couple is also the smallest element in the work. A heart-shaped scroll frame, a ruffled bow and two flaring wings are all larger than the bodies they surround. The apparatus outweighs the thing it presents.
That apparatus is Rococo. Scrollwork cartouches and ribbon bows are the ornamental language in which Boucher and Fragonard licensed erotic subjects, with the embrace sitting inside a frame that makes it decorative. The wings add the older tradition of winged lovers, Cupid and Psyche, but their roots sit on the plate’s rim, not on the bodies. The lift belongs to the setting. The woman’s raised arms echo the spread of the wings, yet she doesn’t wear them. The couple is carried by the stage that displays it.
Each of the four attachments crosses the edge of the well onto the ring of views: the bow at the top, a wing at each side, the key below. Together they form a cross laid over the twelve divisions, so the fantasy overruns its recess and covers the place it is fantasizing about. The key makes the point sharpest. It lies diagonally under the couple’s feet and runs across the lower panels. A key is what a city presents to an honored visitor, and the plate’s ring of city views makes that reading available. Here the couple stands on it, and the bow above ties the whole as a gift. The place offers itself, and the visitor uses the offer to stage the fantasy.
