Album from exhibition in Contemporary Art Centre in Moscow in 1993.

Oscar Reutersvard’s "perspectives japonaises" reflect a lifelong occupation with the problem of illusion and reality. In Sweden the "impossible figures" have transcended the limits of usual artistic recognition (school-children know them, they are on our stamps!). Internationally, they have rendered the artist famous; he has many followers and a few imitators.

Still, Oscar Reutersvard's images retain their immediate freshness and beauty. The reason is, perhaps, that they are constantly in movement; they oscillate on the border-line between geometrical theory and art, between the logic and the mystic. Looked upon from the point of view of theory, they appear to us as beautiful artworks; from the point of view of "pure" art, they. are strikingly theoretical. From the point of view of logic, the impossible figures lead into the mystic; from the point of view of mysticism, they are absolutely transparent.

To a person like myself, with a very limited ability for thinking logically, for subsuming life's different aspects in any global system, the meditation of an image of Oscar Reutersvard gives a kind of therapeutic relief (often accompanied by laughter). Every part of the image is, locally, un-contradictory. Globally, the image also forms a nice whole, but in a way that contradicts the parts. It is the transition from the part to the whole which is "impossible" and sends us away on an endless movement from parts to the whole, from whole to parts. It is impossible to put the figure on any point where this transmission would take place.

Oscar Reutersvard’s images belong to the world of paradoxes, which we need to visit, now and then, in order not to become one with the wall-paper of every- day automatised perception. Here Rene Magritte’s rocks are floating weightlessly, and the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska’s words make no-one surprised:

- My non-arrival in the town of N. was punctual
- You were informed by the unmailed letter
- You managed to not come at the appointed hour...

In this imaginary world, you and I can easily, together, climb the endless staircase and enter Oscar Reutersvard’s grey house from the impossible corner. Let the bewildered smile, with which we wake up, follow us for the rest of the day.

Lars Kleberg