Horses and Divorces

3 July – 12 August, 2025
At Ditte Lauridsen Gallery
Nybrogatan 45, Stockholm. Sweden

In her autobiographical essay “Good to All That,” the inimitable Joan Didion wrote apropos of divorce: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” Her words here appear to underline the self-preserving avoidance of divorce due to its often great stakes and complexities for the individuals. Didion’s words constitute the tragicomic gist of copping out by being on vacation from divorce, taking a break from the inevitable, and the mundane reality being in temporary suspension mode. Meanwhile, in Patti Smith’s monumental song “Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer (De),” in Part 1: Horses, “the boy” looks at “Johnny” and “Johnny” wants to run, but the movie keeps moving just as planned. For the concept album to which the song belongs, Patti Smith uses the imagery of horses as a metaphor for freedom and liberation, both personally as well as artistically in NYC's rock ‘n’ roll scene of the time.

The title of Johan Barrett’s exhibition “HORSES and DIVORCES” frames two oxymoronic words constituting, for him, a personal end and a subsequent new beginning. His recent paintings of motifs which exude escapism, wanderlust and states of frolic, and bodies at evident ease, represent navigating his way through to the other side of a tunnel of the personal collapse of an everyday life that had come to be his and the dark, suffocating clouds of depression. Speaking of finding new love, the love of his life and falling madly in love again over a summer in Stockholm, the artist tells me about, while in even such a state, finding it difficult to anchor in the there and then. Instead, he found allure in the potentialities of a carnivalesque future between the enamored: where to travel, what to see, and such things only yet to happen and materialize. He tells me how the lovers themselves joked about the inability to just indulge in the actual moment of the now. The painted motifs in the exhibition are juxtaposed with sculptures of cigarette smoking: hands holding cigarettes.

I generally don’t smoke, but I think of when I’ve enjoyed it. That is in certain very urban and metropolitan cities where I actually love my self-image while doing so, where it amplifies my leisurely state of mind and adds to my cool. The vice of smoking is one that some people juggle almost like breakups. You want to break with it, but you also don’t, and sometimes you just seem to be unable to. You might, at the behest of others—maybe your loved ones, maybe your children—prompt the stop. But there’s something “fuck it, I’m going to live my life” about it, when you choose to do so, that instantly comes to mind with this exhibition in more ways than one.

Ashik Zaman