Frans Nybacka concentrates on worldbuilding through painting. He combines poetic visual storytelling and imaginative juxtapositions; creating a sense of mystery and layered complexity. He explores a morally and environmentally deteriorating world through the lens of childlike innocence, a perspective that lends even the heaviest themes a sense of gentleness and empathy.
Nybacka repurposes overlooked and found imagery by personifying places, objects, and environments to reveal their emotional and magical presence. His works often resemble loose storyboards or stills from imagined video games, inviting viewers to construct their own narratives within the world he presents. As a starting point, Nybacka gathers a multitude of pictures, combining them before painting, creating a quite intuitively layered composition that will activate the imagination. The paintings present a magnitude of imagery, evoking a sense of continuum. His compositions, that are purposefully flat in nature, contain multiple pathways and points of interest. Nybacka wishes to capture the sensation of looking into something small, which gradually will open up to something greater, with a miniature world unfolding.
The feverishly scraped, yet soft surfaces and faded palette are as characteristic as his fragmented, collage-like visual language. Nybacka works with very small brushes and thin layers of color, which he works diligently. The restrained, monochromatic palette introduces peacefulness to the otherwise busy canvas. Balancing chaos and ethereality, his paintings evoke a quiet melancholy, a sense of warm stillness, wistful, yet hopeful. In this tension between intimacy and expansiveness, Nybacka creates spaces that feel both deeply personal and quietly infinite, inviting prolonged looking and slow discovery.
Frans Nybacka has studied at the Aalto University in Helsinki, and University of Jyväskylä. His works have been exhibited at e.g. numerous galleries as well as Pori Art Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Nybacka’s works are included in several private collections.