NØ: I am interested in your process – what happens in the time between your work in the tunnels and when you come up and start working on a painting. What is it that you tend to get stuck on down there that you choose to bring with you into your practice?

RS: It is often an impression of a place that triggers my creative process. It could be a dark tunnel leading away from the track, with no one knowing where it goes, or a rock face shaped in a unique way, where colours and minerals touch you with their primal power. Sometimes it’s work that I myself have done in the tunnels that later becomes the basis for a painting. One morning, the police were chasing a man armed with a machete in the tunnel where I had just been working. Stories like that also capture the imagination.

NØ: You have previously said that your painting intertwines the practical expression and aesthetics of your work with an interest in esotericism and mythological references to the underground location. Can you tell us more about where you get your symbols and references from, and are there some that you are more drawn to than others?

RS: Esotericism takes place in the closed and the hidden. And there is a parallel that I find interesting with the metro tunnels, which is a forbidden place for most people. This is where my work takes place, hidden away. I often draw mythological references from animals, gods and stories that are connected to the night and the underworld. I feel a closeness to mythology because it intertwines fantasy and experience, something I do in my own storytelling and mythologising of my experiences in the underground.

NØ: Your paintings are mainly figurative, but in the dark paintings you tend to move into something abstract. This question is perhaps more about how you experience the materiality and possibilities of oil painting, but I wonder what drew you to working with only dark surfaces and moving towards abstraction?

RS: After the extensive fire at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2016, I lost paintings and was without a studio for six months. When I started painting again, there were pent-up emotions that needed to be expressed, and I worked feverishly, fixated on the materiality of the paint and the inner imaginary world. Black paint was used extensively, representing the soot, the dark place I depicted, and a state of mind.

Biography

Roger Smeby (b.1990) works with paintings and drawings that are largely based on his experiences as a maintenance worker in the subway tunnels of Stockholm. The concrete and physical representations of the subway are intertwined with the esoteric and subconscious, creating a network of symbols that evoke existential and spiritual concepts regarding life, death and labor. In the exhibition Rallarrosorna (2021) Smeby showed a collection of over 60 works on the subway platforms of Slussen subway station. His works have been exhibited at Kungliga Slottet, Coulisse Gallery, Nordiska Galleriet, Gallery Steinsland Berliner and internationally.

Image: Roger Smeby. Photo: Christofer Dracke