Where the utopian meets grubby, everyday reality

While the Mortar DriesDrawings, collages and sculptures by Jockum Nordström. Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin. Until January 12

If you haven't visited While the Mortar Dries, Jockum Nordström's exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, you should make a point of doing so before it ends on January 12th. Not that it will cheer you up or dazzle you with pyrotechnics, by the way.

As his name suggests, Nordström is Swedish, and aspects of his work live up to the glum, pessimistic Nordic stereotype exemplified by Ingmar Bergman’s films at their bleakest. There’s a dystopian edge to Nordström’s social vision, and a certain cynicism about individual motivations and priorities. Which, as it happens, make him all the more interesting as an artist.

Firstly, what about the lack of pyrotechnics? The show is low-key and intimate, consisting of drawn and watercoloured collages, with occasional black-and-white photographic elements.

Then there are sculptures, modest constructions fashioned from pieces of cut cardboard and empty matchboxes. Colour is subdued, and the finish is deliberately rough, with no effort made to disguise the humble nature of the materials and the often improvised working methods. The collages aren’t very large, but there’s a lot going on in each one, so you have to move in closely and look carefully.

When you do, you find a storybook quality to the imagery. There is quite a large cast of characters, animal and human, the latter dating, judging by their costume and appearance, from several centuries ago right up to the present day.

They engage in a variety of ordinary activities, such as hunting, animal husbandry, tree-felling, musical performance, conversation, study, posing, involvement in several kinds of sport, and sex. There’s the sense that we are looking at a world in miniature and also, as one commentator put it, “a theatre of the mind”.

It’s all very sensitively observed and depicted in pencil with a linear precision that contrives to look casual. Stylistically, there’s a naive look to Nordström’s drawing but it’s anything but naive, he’s clearly an excellent draughtsman.

Equally, as John Hutchinson notes in his brief catalogue text, “pastiche and cuteness” don’t come into it. Rather, Nordström simplifies appearances with great skill and visual eloquence, as do many graphic artists and cartoonists.

In fact he has quite a portfolio as a graphic artist, including the award-winning Sailor and Pekkatrilogy of illustrated books about a retired sailor and his dog (aimed equally at children and adults), a stint as a newspaper illustrator and a series of record sleeves for the Swedish alt-rock band Caesars. He's also made two animated films.

He was born in Stockholm in 1963 and is based there still. He's married to the painter Karin Mamma Andersson, who had a terrific solo show at the Douglas Hyde in 2009 (Nordström has himself shown in Dublin before, playing a substantial part in a group exhibition, In Praise of Shadows, at Imma a couple of years back).

Both he and Andersson show with a leading New York gallery, David Zwirner. Nordström is well established internationally, though it’s fair to say that some American critics and commentators seem to have difficulty in getting the tone of his work – though not, to take one notable example, the performance artist, writer and filmmaker Miranda July, who is a fan.

It’s fair to ask what might be difficult about the tone, though. Several of the sculptures take the form of architectural models, things we usually see as pristine, idealised objects. In Nordström’s treatment, utopian architectural schemes meet the grubby, compromised reality of our everyday world. The beauty of his sculptures – and they really are beautiful – is that we can simultaneously see in them the appeal of the mathematically perfect dream and the cut-and-paste actuality of the way things happen in physical, economic, political and social contexts – that is, in the human world we inescapably inhabit.

That summarises the appeal of his work in a way that holds true when we get to the individual, emotional level of the figurative collages as well. Here, people’s aspirations and notions of themselves are fatally compromised by factors to which they are largely oblivious.

Yet Nordström is not a cruel, patronising satirist, standing aloof and indifferent to the absurdities of the human condition. Hutchinson describes the work as being, in the end, “modest and full of rueful hope”. It is modest in that the artist doesn’t stand apart from the foibles and delusions he describes so vividly. It’s optimistic in its honesty, its dexterous skill and its wry humour.