“I find flat-lay fascinating because it can expose the essence of an object while simultaneously distorting its shape. It reveals and conceals at the same time, making something ordinary feel strangely mysterious,” observed Berlin-based graphic designer Elsa Mueller, Jildevik’s collaborator on the book and its publisher (via her new publishing house Prince). “I find flat-lay fascinating because it can expose the essence of an object while simultaneously distorting its shape,” she continued. “It reveals and conceals at the same time, making something ordinary feel strangely mysterious.”
Born in Stockholm, Jildevik earned a law degree there before moving to Paris to study fashion business and communication at ESMOD after which he worked with CMMN SWDN and Hodakova. An accident broke the linearity of his career and reoriented it towards art. “I’ve been creating since I was a kid, always exploring, collecting and making things. I was an overly nostalgic child, always drawn to, almost obsessed with, old objects, materials, and the lives they carry. I think that fascination has followed me through everything I’ve done.”
The artist himself is a ghost-like constant in the book which derives some of its power from the way it resists the centrality of the body and the narcissism that defines culture today. Jildevik’s pictures are as much portraits of garments as of himself. This idea of a piece of clothing having status as a stand-alone object runs counter to the received wisdom that the body completes a garment. “Removing the body altogether and letting the things that would normally surround or cover it take its place is something that really interests me,” Jildevik said. “I’ve spent over 15 years collecting clothes and objects, and they’ve all become part of my life in different ways. They carry memories, different periods of my life, and sometimes versions of myself that no longer exist. With Portrait of the Absent, I started taking these things out of their original context, rearranging them into new compositions and photographing them as self-portraits. … The person is absent, but in a way everything that makes the portrait personal is still there.”
Almost everything—the face is usually the focal point of a portrait. This book forces us to consider how clothing can communicate identity without the body, or gestures, or the visage, but rather through arrangement and spatial orientation.
