What You See is What You Get series.

Some run a Marathon, some run to escape, some run without any reason, some run towards love.

Returning to his roots in his latest body of work, Wahlstrom is mining the history of modern art to conjure up images that pay homage to the artists who first made an impact on him. Recalling the Russian and German expressionists, like Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, who made their mark in the early part of 20thCentury, and CoBrA painters, like Karel Appel, Corneille and Asger Jorn, who were leaders of a short-lived Post-war art movement that continues to have an influence on artists, even in our current times.

Not forgetting his consequential social concerns, Wahlstrom has found ways to insert existing issues into his colorful new canvases. Beginning by drawing a social scene that he envisions directly on unstretched canvas with a marker or a brush, he then finalizes his expressive figures with a lively palette of high-quality acrylic, or his own pigment mixed with
urethane paints. Working in a stream of consciousness manner—similar to how Keith Haring would spontaneously render an eye-catching work on a public wall or a vinyl tarp—Wahlstrom swiftly brings his visions to life. Two of the initial paintings in his aptly titled What You See Is What You Get series reference the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the use of the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag, which are also the colors of the Swedish flag. His expressive Runners painting shows a group of cattle-like characters frantically fleeing a collapsing city while grasping babies and belonging as. their limbs separate. Likewise, Let the Children Play captures primitively drawn and painted toddlers—rendered like Jean Dubuffet might see them—clinging to the monkey bars or numbly observing their scattered toys in the middle of a war zone.

Excerpts from a text written by Paul Laster, New York, August 2023