Dan Backman’s artwork contains multi-track expressions, where material variation and alternating techniques provide a track-map with divergent topology. 

An enigmatic numbered color field seems to be both self-referential and associative to something external. 

Is it a game plan, a drawing, a colorimetric, or maybe a periodic system?
Models that are both concretion and abstraction.

Recurring themes are an ambiguous, or multivocal, geometry that opens up for both abstract and figurative reading. 

For the same image in its ambivalence can just as easily be zoomed in and enlarged ornamentation, textile or plant fibers wrapped around, DNA strands or marquetry on colored beams from a house drawing. 

It is in this uncertainty, in collaboration with a painterly precision, that the strength of the works can be found; an own coherence, somewhat enigmatic and alluring, where the emphasis is on the unanswered.

Echoes from previous decades art-theoretical debates have a renewed resonance here: several of the works seem to provide an alternative answer to the question of formalism, empiricism and deconstruction. 

These works also raise questions about the relationship between artist and critic. Contact surfaces exist, even if the relationship to intuition, process, quotation, analysis and design differs. In the series of laminated collages (mixed media, photomontage), fragments from the documentary aspects of criticism seem to have been incorporated and created a dissolving and critical view of categorization, systematics and production.

Anders Hellqvist