RUNO LAGOMARSINO

Runo Lagomarsino
The Persistent Action of a Falling Tear
27.04.23 - 07.07.23

Please find a link to the portfolio here 

We are pleased to present Runo Lagomarsino's solo-exhibition at the gallery The Persistent Action of a Falling Tear. Runo Lagomarsino (b.1977, Lund, Sweden) develops works that presents a critical vision on the construction of history-based themes or analyses connections between modernism and current geopolitics. Lagomarsino’s work present a well-defined political position, posses an unfinished and fragmented aspect, and act as provocative and open reflections on relations of territory and exclusion. 


Tears, crashes, memories, disruption

A moth drinking tears of a sleeping bird. Let’s start here. Let’s stop here: A moth drinking tears of a sleeping bird. As we are talking about the work by Runo Lagomarsino, it makes sense to focus on a possible detail; the universe — in Runo Lagomarsino’s way of doing — is defined through a close observation of small gestures, a poetical perception of politics, a warm approach to tragedy, a dichotomy paradoxically based on multiple possibilities. The starting point could be everywhere yet understanding that this “everywhere” requires a desire for narrativity, observation and the assumption of a reality that both touches your skin and the one from many others before you and me.

A moth drinking tears of a sleeping bird. A sleeping bird in tears. Tears as food, as nutrients, as material. Tears of a bird. Tears as starting point. In plural. We will find more tears in Runo Lagomarsino’s work — connected tears in disconnected times. Individual tears, symbolic tears, societal tears. Tears becoming nutrients and a way to scream. Tears being culture, injustice, violence. But also, delicate caresses loaded with fragility. Historical tears and fictionalised ones. We will talk about more tears, some of them “real”, some of them maybe too beautiful to be authentic. The tears of a bird and a moth drinking. Can birds cry? Can birds sleep? I seem to remember some conversations about animal brains being ready for a possible problem: half of the brain awake while the other one is asleep. I don’t remember any conversation about birds crying.

In Le Miroir des Limbes. La corde et les souris, André Malraux remembers a shared moment with Picasso. Malraux, Picasso and Bergamín are at the painter’s studio. Picasso is finishing Guernica but he is not sure if this is the time for a black and white painting. To discard possibilities, he has tested a layer of colored papers covering parts of the massive work. It will be black and white; the reference to Goya is pertinent, the disasters of the war. Picasso is taking down some metal garnet-red tears that he has placed on the painting, making some figures cry. As we know, Guernica will have no extra layers, no traces of color, but Malraux describes the moment when Picasso gathers all of the tears and places them in Bergamín’s hands. In Malraux’s memory, Picasso says to Bergamín that he is getting the tears of Spain. The same situation is slightly different if we follow Bergamín’s version: it's just one tear and made of red paper. In this version, Picasso asks Bergamín to place the tear on Guernica every Friday at the time the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic is opened to the public.

The 1937 Pavilion of the Spanish Republic in Paris was both projection of desired joy and real rage, sadness and desperation. Bergamín was the commissioner, Miró had another iconic political painting, the photographs by Josep Renau defined a possible egalitarian society, Sert was the architect of the functional building structuring the project, Calder had a mercury fountain that is now at Miró Foundation in Barcelona. On the ground floor of the pavilion, next to the patio, Guernica covered one of the walls. Guernica, the painting, Guernica, the devastated location in the Basque Country. Guernica, history in present. Guernica, memory of war.

Runo Lagomarsino observes — again — the possibility of the expanded narrative to look closely at Guernica’s never included tear. The red tear. A tear that would change the role of the work. If the tear was supposed to be the activator of the painting, then the artwork would not be a painting anymore, but time and a performative situation. The historical value of Picasso’s painting as symbolic vocabulary for the pain provoked by any war would not just be iconic but in movement. And, furthermore, what happened to the red tear or tears? Some voices say that the tear never left Paris when it was time for Bergamín to escape from Europe for exile in Mexico. Other Spanish refugees died in France; some were able to fly away again. Lost tears. Forgotten memories. Runo Lagomarsino takes the tears back and creates an infinite machine to provide a space and time for the red tears to be present. Movement is included, time becomes visible, tears are produced and they fall. They fall again. Tears falling in a continuum of lost memories, future images, statements, history, fragments of time. The gallery space observes the soft movement of the tears falling, the slow tempo and the continuous mechanical work that supports and maintains fragility.

If we think about historical moments happening now in front of our eyes, what do we do with historical places? How does a place remain in the past? Guernica is also a present place; it’s a moment now; it’s day or night. Runo Lagomarsino connects the now at Guernica with the desire for the tears defining the temporality of a painting. A glass globe in the exhibition space shines with the same amount of light that Guernica has at this very moment. The light, a fleeting moment, connects two places sharing time. What happens here happens there. Guernica is alive: Guernica is alive and the tears are alive; sunset will come, and darkness will appear. Or electricity and the mechanics that destroyed a past Guernica will help us to see. Now. At the middle top area of Guernica there is a light bulb.

The gesture is visible, the connection is fragile and temporary. Life is. It can be light, it can be a tear, it can be a desire to bring the past to the present, it can be the need for a memory and for justice after devastation. Bodies and stones, buildings and culture. Probably more tears will bring us to Melina Mercouri.

Who is Melina Mercouri? Why is Melina Mercouri appearing now in this text about the work by Runo Lagomarsino? Well, the successful Greek actress Melina Mercouri was, after a long film career, Minister of Culture of Greece. In this position she was a key figure in reclaiming the marbles of the Parthenon for the country. Removed from the Acropolis in Athens to be presented as part of the collection of the British Museum, the marbles were kept far from their original location. The desire to solve an historical dismantling and to bring to the same spot the stolen material was a driving force for Melina Mercouri. With her incredible talent for emotional and cinematic storytelling, Mercouri was able to put feelings and words into a dialogue previously impossible while touching the marbles. Greece could be the place for its stones, Greece could safeguard the history of Europe. Greece was ready to take on the responsibility. In Mercouri’s narrative Greece was the cradle of what European culture and to disrespect Greece was to disrespect Europe. Melina Mercouri in conversation with the director of the British Museum, Melina Mercouri connecting with past stones, Melina Mercouri feeling the stones, Melina Mercouri reclaiming the right to own the material for the narrative. The narrative of Europe. A Europe that is not anymore a simple narrative, a Europe that is not in a book, a Europe being destroyed, dismantled, sold.

Europium is the chemical element with the symbol Eu. Named after Europe, Europium is an extremely fragile metallic element. Very reactive. Europium must be stored in the absence of air, as it rapidly oxidises. A fragile construction, a historical one. An element needing specific conditions. Care. But do we want to keep this material in a secured context? Is it possible to keep tears in the void? Runo Lagomarsino proposes at his exhibition a process of visible degradation. The gesture, the fall and to see how it matters. Europium and Europe crashing against the wall, the rest being oxidated, the tears falling as lost memory, the marbles still in London. But the light, the light. Every Friday in 1937 no tear was attached to Guernica. In 2023, tears, crashes and oxidation.

– Martí Manen  

 

OLAF BREUNING

Olaf Breuning
It's still a garden
24.02.23 - 14.04.23


We are pleased to present Olaf Breuning's solo exhibition at the gallery: It's still a garden. Breuning works in different mediums including photography, drawing, sculpture, video, and installation. In his work Breuning explores the boundaries between fact and fiction, where art becomes a part of life and not an isolated world that unfolds in parallel with the rest of society.


The zany, the cute and the interesting are defined by literary critic and theorist Sianne Ngai as aesthetic categories that permeate our modern culture and that dominate both its art and its commodities. Ngai examines how these categories express ambivalent feelings, which are ultimately tied to how modern subjects work, exchange and consume. Ngai explores the consequences of an aesthetic “littleness”, or what is perceived as diminutive and subordinate and the cute as something that produces feelings of both caring and aggression at the same time.

Breuning's sculptures blur the line between the innocence of childhood and the fear that comes with adulthood. A sculptural landscape of trees, birds, crocodiles, and mushrooms spreads throughout the room. Large, hand-dipped candles protrude from the figures everywhere – the circles that adorn the candles are echoed in the colourful woodcuts that hang on the wall. The works, which are not too distant from school-play scenery, nor children's drawings of a hen, a worm, or a cluster of spiders, reflect the idea that cuteness is both appealing and frightening. Breuning's sculptures are humoristic, and they are cute. Cute, in their simplicity, cute as a stepsister to both the beautiful and the ugly. The cute is an aestheticization of powerlessness, a form of affective response to an absence of agency. To judge something as cute, you must first feel your own dominance in relation to it. We love what submit to us.[1]

Breuning's woodcuts are created through an intuitive process to retain the raw quality of the materials. Both woodcuts and sculptures are created with or out of wood, and the use of nature in the works enables the works to talk about nature: the relationship between humans and nature, how we use and control it. At first glance, Breuning's sculptures seem cute and endearing, with their exaggerated expressions and playful shapes. The hand-dipped lights stick out in an almost tentacle-like manner. The number of lights is overwhelming; they clearly attest to countless hours of work, in an activity familiar to many from childhood. The sculptures are not just cute but are also massive. Their very size attests to their material, they bear witness to the fact that we are simply passing through and what lasts has always been here.

Upon closer inspection, what we perceive as cute is laden with an underlying sense of discomfort. Breuning's sculptures are not just cute. There is something menacing about what we initially classify as cute. When we give something a face, a deformed face with huge eyes and no mouth or a very small one, we deny it, conversely, the use of speech. A cute face is incomplete and does not look like our own. The facial features are enlarged or reduced. It is a paradoxical face that must have just enough faceness to be able to meet our own and generate empathy, but not enough humanization to make it our equal. If the latter were the case, the very power difference on which the aesthetics of cuteness depends would be erased. The cute is denied speech, by our own hand. In this lies a latent threat. If things or objects can be personified, then surely people can also be transformed into things? What goes around comes around. The power of the cute is made up of our own aggressive affect, which was directed at the cute and returns against us with all its force. Our aggressiveness ends up coming back to us. The cuteness of the object attests to its later ability to take revenge on a society that has made it harmless, just like nature's potential to later avenge its abuse at our hands.

Rationality and power stand in stark contrast to the fluidity and softness of the cute but are in one and the same way a part of it. Therefore, what is cute is also, in some capacity, incredibly threatening to us. We cannot understand power, humans’ power over nature, our power over each other, without examining its counterpart.

By Clara Sofie Christiansen


[1] Ngai, Sianne: Our Aesthetic Categories p. 125

 

REBECCA LINDSMYR

Rebecca Lindsmyr – A Mouthful

6.10.22 – 19.11.22

Opening, October 6. 2022 between 17.00 – 20.00

It is our pleasure to present Rebecca Lindsmyr’s first solo exhibition at NILS STÆRK.

Rebecca Lindsmyr’s work explores the intensity of painterly representation. Acting within the medium of painting, the exhibition travels from seemingly abstract colors and textures to a glossy representation of a singular popsicle. Free of conventions, Lindsmyr presents a myriad of perspectives shifting between states of the macro and the micro, blurring the lines between figuration and abstraction.

One could argue that abstraction lies in between a state of becoming and remaining. This also extends to our own position as viewer. Going from canvas to canvas, our bodies perform a similar gesture of moving in and out of focus. Some works even feel as though they are mirroring the different states that we physically move between, peering directly into our own bodily presence. These shifts in perspectives explore the glitches within static definitions and confronts one’s own experience of bodily presence with a sense of intimacy, sensuality, discomfort, and disgust. Feelings that the embodied self and the painting structurally can be argued to share.

Rebecca Lindsmyr (b. 1990, Sweden) graduated with an MFA from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2021, and previously holds a BA from Glasgow School of Art.


Contrary to what enters the mouth and nourishes, what goes out of the body, out of its pores and openings, points to the infinitude of the body proper and gives rise to abjection.[1]

In her writings on abjection, Julia Kristeva puts forth a position of the abject proposed neither as being an object, nor subject. The experience of abjection, however, must be seen as central to the subject’s crafting of selfhood. The formation of ‘I’ occurs through a continuous process of actively distancing and separating the self from the other. A process of othering that is at the core of abject experience. In the introduction to Powers of Horror, Kristeva finds an example in the sensation of acute disgust she experiences in her lips meeting the skin formed on the surface of warm milk. The appalling nature of this new, animate materiality generates a rupture with the knowledge of milk’s potential nourishment: that skin on the surface of milk – harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper […] and, still further down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and the organs shrivel up the body.[2]

This confrontation with the delicacy of one’s own material being, is from where A Mouthful could be seen to unfold. It is grasped at through tracing the imprint of a child’s encounter with the visual material of a medical lexicon used for classifying infections of the skin – reanimated through painterly processing. Suggested is a possible miming situated between the materiality of paint and that of the body. Lindsmyr’s approach in seeking out the affective and psychological event of abjection, is something meticulously manufactured. An effect perhaps more implosive, than explosive, akin to the example of Kristeva’s food-loathing, where the capacity of the abject to invoke intense disruption acts on a seemingly minute scale. 

(The) infection confronts us with an otherness at the threshold of our own body. Without chasing a holistic, or animistic point of view, it can be said to offer up a state of ‘amplified cohabitation’, proposing a heightened (self)awareness of body as undeniably shared and fluid territory.

Donatella Di Cesare’s recent writings, published in the wake of a (still ongoing) global pandemic, probes the spilling and overflowing body as it is shuffled through an ever more omnipresent biopolitical machinery enforced by present-day capitalist societies[3]. Measures that may appear, at first glance, as taking place on the surface (such as infrared cameras using the measurement of temperature on the skin in an attempt to determine if an individual harbors an ongoing, or oncoming infection), will always be a transaction moving from the inside out. Rendering bodies increasingly transparent to systems of surveillance and control.

Through the series Untitled (Plansch #) a painterly method of infiltration is set out, as if to corrode its own material. Eating holes into or out of previous layers; overwriting cells, the messages, or codes of transmission. Acts of intrusion are carried out in several ways. A sequence of abstract paintings, rendered in an illusory, almost photographic quality, occurs as punctured by a singular act of figuration; dismantling conventions of figuration and abstraction as representing opposing attitudes to image construction.

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A mouthful, or a mouth filled; cheeks inflate to the brim with potential excess. Teeth clenched at the point of leaking. Words or matter? The linguistic mouthful will, by a twist of the tongue, challenge the limits of oral muscles to take complete hold of a sentence. A chunk of syllables bit from the edge of a fully formed language.

In one of her ongoing series of paintings, Allison Katz presents a visual domain as seen from the vantage point of a wide-open mouth. An inverted perspective colliding the gazing in with the gazing out, suggesting a mouth acting as threshold as well as stage. In the review of a recent presentation of Katz’s at the Camden Art Centre, writer Brian Dillon refers to the works as ‘epiglottal perspectives’[4]. Implying a smallness of the viewer – a spectator, an audience, or an artist, adapting to the limited aperture between two rows of teeth – this internal position provokes historical renditions of a subject limited to the confines of the (inside)body. The epiglottis, which here functions as anchor, is fundamental for carrying out any kinds of voicing, or speech, but also, needs to remain completely sealed, in order for one not to choke on food or liquid.

Lindsmyr’s exhibition sees a figure of the mouth that is double-sided, both on the level of language and image. It plays with ideas of consumption, not only in the contours of a body having lost its form, but also in the slightly vulgar presence of an oversized popsicle. From the position of a miniaturized and partially internal spectator, this would indeed be a literal mouthful. This way of the double alludes to a certain linguistics of self-devourment. As, already in the etymology of the object, one finds the mechanisms of its self-consumption, lolly being another word for tongue.

The title Mère de Glace[5] makes reference to a chapter in Luce Irigaray’s landmark publication Speculum of the Other Woman. Appropriating the writing (and hence: language) of the Greek philosopher Plotinus, in a bid to subvert a discourse on matter which strictly dictates the gendering of bodies, Irigaray performs a deconstruction through the direct hijacking of authorship. The reference to this essay seems to lead us further towards a psychoanalytic relation to the ordering of language. Following this line of thought, the suggestively phallic appearance of the popsicle will play with the established understanding of the phallus as being the possessor of language and power. In its painted state of perpetual solidity, the popsicle also acts in lieu of the body; of the smooth and impenetrable surface of the ‘porcelain skin’ in much classical figuration. This conceptual abstraction – while suggesting an ailment to our symptoms – not only undermines any attempts at categorizing the artist’s position as ‘abstract painter’, but also pressures the porosity of such a position in the first place. The resulting juxtaposition is one that seemingly echoes Kristeva’s idea(s) of the abject in-between; a violent ambiguity that respects no borders or fixed positions.

As in the case of digital code, where different applications of syntax may be used to determine an argument to be valid either within the system as a whole, or simply within the confines of its locality, the layout of the exhibition seems to claim that figuration might here be the actual abstraction. The composition adheres to a breaking down, and rearranging of its own logic. Inserting a glitch to actively dim the distinction between abstract and figurative.

As a viewer stepping into the gallery, one is found bouncing between micro and macro. A pulse of seduction and aversion. Drawn closer to the abstract (close-up), only to be confronted with what is expelled. Just as one steps back from figuration only to fully see, and to face, an object destined to enter.

– Emil Sandström

[1] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 108.
[2] Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2-3.
[3] See: Donatella Di Cesare, Immunodemocracy: Capitalist Asphyxia (London: Semiotext(e), 2020)
[4] Brian Dillon, The Big Review: 'Allison Katz: Artery' at Camden Arts Centre, London. The Art Newspaper, February 7, 2022. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/02/07/the-big-review-allison-katz-artery-at-camden-arts-centre-london 
[5] Mère de Glace directly translates to ‘Mother of Ice’, a play on words with the French term ‘mer de glace’, meaning ‘sea of ice’, the name given to France’s largest glacier.

 

 

Are we there yet?

Are We There Yet?

30.11.22 - 28.01.23

We are pleased to present the group exhibition Are we there yet? 

The exhibition brings together seven artistic positions and spans painting, drawing, sound, sculpture, installation and text with works by Andreas Albrectsen (1986, DK/BR), Allora & Calzadilla (1974, US/1971, CU), Paul Fägerskiöld (1986, SE), Ceal Floyer (1968, UK), Jone Kvie (1971, NO), Eau Pernice (1989, DK) and Maša Tomšič (1986, SLO).


Are we there yet? was among the most googled questions in 2021. It is a trivial yet ambiguous statement about how far we still are from our destination – as individuals and as a species. From a macro perspective, the question has an existential dimension which sums up our impatient approach to the present and the future as a finishing line. With its open and questioning phrasing, the exhibition title thus establishes a reflective framework for the works, which are all based on modified everyday objects that cut across geographical barriers. Whether it be a psalm, software or faux flora, the exhibited works are all cultural modifications of existing symbols of nature – and thus undergo a marked semiotic transformation. In this negotiation of material and connotations, each artist reflects on the ecological conditions under which we live. The exhibition moves like turbulence in the air between prediction and future reality. Have we already entered the Eremocene epoch – ‘the Age of Loneliness’ as described by the American biologist E.O. Wilson – or are we on our way?

In Ceal Floyer's work Warning Birds, the silhouettes of buzzards encircle the windowpanes of the gallery. This kind of sticker is usually placed individually to scare birds away and thus prevent them from colliding with the glass. In the exhibition, however, the warning birds appear in droves, preventing passers-by and visitors to the gallery from looking through the apertures of the space. The flocks surround all the windows like a dense, unpredictable decoration, and their presence creates an alarming atmosphere reminiscent of the black-and-white scenes of attack in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 horror film 'The Birds'. By increasing the number of warning birds there is a marked psychological shift in the way we experience the silhouette stickers, and with this shift Floyer creates a potentially wider range of associations. Hitchcock constantly alludes to the similarity between humans and birds; the murderous flocks of ravens may be interpreted as violent manifestations of the main characters' internal conflicts. Floyer's Warning Birds provokes an ominous effect in both passerines and people – hence both species share a common primal instinct that causes us to feel vulnerable outside the flock. A total absence of birds is an ecological threat to our very existence. A case in point is the famine that broke out in China between 1958-1961 after Mao Zedong had ordered a systematic mass culling of the country's sparrows, which were considered pests. This led to an ecological imbalance, where the absence of sparrows, in turn, caused an explosive increase in the number of insects. Floyer's myriad of buzzard shadows may act as a catalyst for a subconscious and irrational ornithophobia, but in nature they would indicate a mounting external threat. During natural disasters, animals are always the first to sense when danger is in the air.

By measuring the weather, we adapt to climate change – for now – because the consequences of global warming are accelerating faster than ever before. When the ancestors of the birds, the theropods, ruled the Earth, the planet’s CO2 levels were much higher than now, but climate change was so slow that the evolution of species could keep up. Today we find out about the weather, indoors, from a screen. We may make use of satellites and complex probability calculations but we still live isolated from the grim reality that our society cannot continue to keep up with the climate unless we change our collective consumption patterns. We hang on to the notion of ‘doomsday soon, but not today’.

There is something eerily scenic about the massive installation Graft by Allora & Calzadilla. As in the wake of a storm, thousands of pink flowers form a scattered trail on the floor of the exhibition space. The flowers, made to resemble the blossoms of the Caribbean oak tree Tabebuia heterophylla, are rendered in seven different stages of decomposition. Twenty-one gradations of colour appear, from the hues of freshly fallen leaves to withered and brown ones, lending the artificial flowers an air of hyperrealism. Like the title, the artist duo refers to grafting or cloning, and this extreme presence of flowers in the exhibition space brings to mind man's exploitation of natural resources and the climate changes that this has brought about. Despite the systematic depletion of Caribbean flora and fauna by colonial rule, the area remains a biodiversity hotspot. Graft demonstrates the vast scale of the consequences of rising temperatures, mirroring how increasingly frequent occurrences of devastating weather are changing the landscape – an almost blaring silence after more and stronger storms.

In Andreas Albrectsen’s work Untitled (Elke) we are presented with a pencil drawing of a weather chart showing the wind directions above Europe on 14 October 2022. Albrectsen used computer-animated graphics from ECMF (European Centre for Medium-Range Forecasts) as the model for his work. It is a diagram based on data from satellite monitoring and then mapped by hand, using pencil on paper. The eddies and changing air pressures are represented by greyish patches plotted faintly in across national frontiers. The hundreds of arrows, forming a dense pattern of movement, follow the atmospheric logic of the wind. But, at the same time, it is tempting to see the arrows as tumultuous connections between nations. The arrow is a universal symbol of direction but also, ultimately, a weapon. One meteorological consequence of war is the destruction of weather stations and observatories, leaving the scientists with 'blind spots' and thus making weather forecasts less reliable in the absence of data.

The drawing encapsulates both a forecast and a process – a before, during and after all in one. The precise date of the forecast is not in itself significant and should be seen rather as a geopolitical prediction and a need to put this particular period of time into perspective. The autumn of 2022 was marked by major ideological power struggles in Europe, Brazil and the US, where both climate and democratic principles were key voting issues. The title of the work (Elke) refers to the name of an actual windstorm that hit Scandinavia, the UK, Estonia and Russia in the middle of October. Elke was not in itself disastrous, but may be seen as a proxy for the sociostructural currents that, in the long run, may prove to be so.

The wind is only manifest in the objects it moves or if it has sufficient strength to cause something to break. But it is also a symbol of progress. Among the oldest and best-known representations of wind are Leonardo da Vinci's Deluge drawings from about 1517-19, in which he combined a scientific and artistic interest in the wind's undulating patterns of movement. In 1805 Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort devised a scale for estimating wind velocities so that it became possible, finally, to speak of its speed objectively – whereas before one man's breeze might have been another man's hurricane. In the Beaufort Scale all numbered wind levels from 0-12 are accompanied by a short description of their impact – level 4, for example: ‘raises dust and loose paper – small branches move’. Dust and paper – an apt and precise description of Albrectsen's typical choice of materials.

Digital representations of the world have also altered our experience of time. They have expanded our notion of 'being present' to include multiple locations simultaneously. In Paul Fägerskiöld's painting the large horizontal canvas appears as an abstract composition, without an end or a beginning. This is so despite the fact that the title of the work indicates a very specific place on the planet. Using computer software called 'Starry Night', Fägerskiöld constructs images of the cosmos in the future. The programme can calculate precise star constellations from any location on Earth and nearby galaxies at any chosen date, thousands of years into the future as well as in the past. Although the title South Tarawa. Kiribati Islands. View East. January 1 2100 evokes a specific place, the painting shows little more than a composition of holes through to the canvas where the layers of pastose oil paint have not been applied. Despite a very concrete starting point, the painting does not show a discernible figure or landscape. Rather, it incorporates human behaviour and language; a representative image of gaining access to the future in an attempt to understand the present. Imagining the future is in itself abstract. The very emptiness of the painting inevitably becomes an image of where man is right now – the absence of figuration becomes an image of our severed relationship with nature. If, instead, you go back 80 years, man could navigate by the stars. Today some people associate the reading of the constellations with superstition. Because we no longer, in densely populated cities, have access to the starry sky the way we used to, we may have forgotten that the stars can predict weather change. The constellations are obscured by smog and the extreme amount of light used by big cities, which is why the stars may be the perfect image of the man-made climate change that has altered the living conditions on our planet.

The Swedish playwright August Strindberg is little known for his periods of intense dedication to painting and photography during the 1890s. His artistic experiments, however, show evident interactions between technology and nature. In particular, his celestographs, for which he would place a photographic plate in the window and expose it to the starry sky, seem to be in physical alliance with nature. With their weathered surfaces the photographs actually resemble celestial scenes. But you might just as easily see dust or a bit of earth. The singularity of such images, whether in film, photography or painting, rests on their offering this double vision where the starry night and matter are connected, and microcosm and macrocosm affect us equally. Kiribati is deeply affected by climate change because of sharply increased water levels and its culture is at risk. It would seem impossible to live there in the future. Will we still be here then? Will our children be here – will they even perceive our world in the same way? The works confront us with our own situation in life. That is what makes them so credible.

Jone Kvie's work series Second Messenger #1, #4 and #6 explores the relationship between body and landscape. The sculptural group consisting of untreated basalt, a volcanic rock type, seems joined in mystical union with aluminium casts of man-made surplus materials such as plywood structures and leftover packaging. Basalt is formed by the rapid cooling of magnesium-rich lava ejected from the Earth's interior and is thus eruptive unlike other rock types such as sedimentary rock. Lying there, alongside representations of man-made material, the elongated and soft basalt shapes could resemble body parts or torsos. On some level they might be exactly that: basalt consists mainly of calcium and is in certain ways identical to the calcium ions that enable signals from the brain to the body's nervous system. This could explain why the sculptures form a subconscious connection to the body in the exhibition space – as a representation of the meeting between nature's unprocessed forms and man-made casts of a man-made material.

The German artist Josef Beuys conceived of basalt as a representation of Earth's energy and planned to place this stone next to each of the seven thousand oak trees he intended to plant in the German city of Kassel for his work The End of the Twentieth Century (1983-85).1 Similarly, the Second Messenger series is an expression of a practice that seeks to re-establish modern man's lost connection to nature by aligning his work with it. Kvie's works are situated at the threshold between culture and nature. It is as if he explores all possible meanings of the word nature, thus showing that the understanding of this ambiguous concept takes on specific meanings depending on whether the word with which it is juxtaposed is associated with culture, society, awareness or morality. Therefore, the works can also easily be regarded as an investigation of the very foundations of artistic creation, namely the, ontologically speaking, sharp distinction between nature and culture as two basically different forms of existence.

By repeating the repetitive pattern of nature, the works require us to move beyond the limitations that individuality conjures up. As if to insist that the separation of nature and culture is a fiction.2 The rocks of basalt remain as an apocalyptic element of the landscape to remind us that the environment and man, as well as the things we leave behind, are part of a fragile symbiosis.

Haneloså Eat Sundnis is the title of a sound installation by Eau Pernice, featuring a recording of the psalm, in three voices, Se, nu stiger solen af havets skød (Look, the Sun Is Rising from the Bosom of the Sea), a Danish song with lyrics by a Danish pastor and author, Jakob Knudsen, from 1890 and melody by Oluf Ring from about 1915. The title of the work, like the sound image, does not make immediate sense. It is sung backwards, so that phrases like ‘Lysvæld bag ved lysvæld i himlen ind, did, hvorfra den kommer nu, morgnens vind (...)’ become sound words without any real meaning. The work consists of two audio tracks played synchronously.

One speaker plays the song forwards, while the other plays the same song backwards. The meeting of the two soundtracks creates a captivating soundscape where words dissolve into sounds and breaths resemble wind or breeze. The phonetic reversal rephrases the song, making it sound as if it is spoken backwards. The new lyrics that are created make no overall sense, whereas individual words reappear as new, already familiar words such as eat, days or platform.

The original song is a hymn to God's creation with nature as the primary metaphor. In the rearrangement of the song the landscape descriptions are dropped in favour of a new mystical text without a consistent coherent content. Written more than a hundred years ago, the lyrics present a language that for most people of today means something else, or perhaps has no meaning at all? Pernice's sound work is like a translation of an obsolete language which creates new meanings or perhaps even attempts to predict the future of nature. Updating an old song about nature can in itself be seen as a consequence of the fact that current stories about the world's oceans, the wind and the sun have changed our understanding of them. The way we humans understand natural phenomena today is inspired by a different narrative, one that is determined to a much higher degree by the climatic changes that nature is undergoing. Arguably, the words Haneloså Eat Sundnis have no concrete or intelligible meaning. Nevertheless, the text prompts us to search for meaning – as when we notice individual words that mean something, albeit in a different language. The sound work may actually be an expression of the fact that, as human beings, we must embark on the journey of re-appropriating and understanding nature anew. New readings are needed so that new narratives may emerge. It is odd that the Danish language consists of an overabundance of fixed expressions in which the weather or nature is used as a metaphor for something that does not make sense; ‘en sang fra de varme lande’, which translates as ‘a song from hot countries’, is a saying referring to a meaningless answer or ‘søforklaring’, literally a ‘sea explanation’, used to denote prevarications. A word like ‘mundsvejr’, literally ‘mouth air/breath’ or ‘mouth weather’, in English ‘hot air’, is also used for statements without real content, as a conceptualisation of the air that flows out of one’s mouth during speech.

The wind as a phenomenon and metaphor performs multiple roles in the exhibition. Maša Tomšič is a researcher and contributes the essay Anemometry, which refers to the perceptual aspects of measuring wind. In this context the text works as a parallel reading that deals with the very same considerations regarding the experience or perception of natural phenomena. Tomšič has reproduced her written contribution to the exhibition in the format of an A5 flyer. The flyer is an early form of mass communication whose purpose it is to cover as wide an area as possible and reach as many people as possible. Throughout the world wars of history this little paper flyer has been a vehicle of propaganda which could be spread from the sky by aeroplane. In more modern times the flyer is better known as a colourful hand-out from the advertising industry to draw our attention to a product or an event. In Tomšič’s flyer the deadpan blue colour refers to a fatal system fault in the Windows operating system which is known as the ‘Blue Screen of Death’. The same monochrome colour tone is also used in the production of weather forecasts on TV where the satellite map is often inserted in the background by using a blue or green chromakey screen.

Laura Goldschmidt

[1] Magnus af Petersens: ‘Jone Kvie: A Glossary’ in Jone Kvie, Here, here, 2019.
[2] Bruno Latour: We Have Never Been Modern, 1993.

 

GARDAR EIDE EINARSSON

Gardar Eide Einarsson
“It's got to change. It's going to change. I mean, it's not a question of, “I hope it changes.” It's going to change, a hundred percent."
19.08.22 - 01.10.22

⁠It is our pleasure to present Gardar Eide Einarsson's 7th solo exhibition at NILS STÆRK.

Artist Plus

Gardar, as you know, I’ve really pushed for you to embrace an identity as an ‘artist plus’. What I mean is that you could be making art as well as doing something else professionally. Doing something else in addition. Artist plus entrepreneur. Artist plus investor. Artist plus amateur martial artist. Of course, you’re a dad, husband, son, house flipper, globalist etc. Not to take anything away from those personae, but I am speaking strictly about your professional identity. I would love to see you do more than art making, and I don’t mean this to be diminishing in any way towards your art practice. There’s always been a feeling of cognitive surplus with you, Gardar. You have spare capacity. I think you have mastered the art practice, you’ve cashed it out and, when we think of what’s possible now in the context of lifetime learning, job mobility and moving onto new horizons, there’s this real question of what’s next for you. Is making art the best vehicle for exploring this world and its conditions of existence right now? I mean it’s not a bad home base in your 20s, but are you self-actualized today? After two decades you could reasonably consider oscillating off of art for a bit, maybe taking an intentional sabbatical and doing something else, acquiring a new skill. Then come back if you really want.

I guess this sums it up: it’s not too late.

*****

And let me just add: your powers of observation are incredible, as is your wit—the velocity of it, the generosity of it, the span. You take social risk in your stride. I send you articles on startups and tech-themed podcasts, and you read all of them. I think there’s a latent entrepreneur in you, your risk tolerance is certainly ratcheted in the right direction.

And Gardar, you know I’ve tried many times to lure you into white-collar work. The closest you came was taking catering jobs – you were just having none of it from me. Even so, I believe you do have the intuitions of a proper deal guy. If you were doing something substantive in crypto other than investing, you’d probably be leading a company. I suspect it’s your allergy to building anything that resembles an institution that keeps you out. And yet I remain hopeful and more curious than ever. What would you do in the driver’s seat? The latent C-suite Gardar would be interesting to engage for advice from time to time.

*****

Gardar, when I see the deprecated bitcoin mining rig frames in this show, I think, hmmm, okay, interesting. The artist is probably doing something here about bitcoin’s early, exuberant phase and that alchemical conversion of coal to electrons to currency. Cheap computation. And maybe there’s a gesture towards the virtualization that occurs in physical manufacturing processes—electrons moving bits moving atoms etc. But I’m not sure there’s anything trenchant here so much as evasive. The sculptures are like 3-D lyrics from a crypto folk ballad, sentimental utopianism gone to seed. The racks are colorful, minimalist, cheerful—referentially dense—and, like great art, they refer to other great art. A smart way to insert yourself into the conversation without being invited. We all see what you did there.

Fair warning: I’m not going to engage with the hedge fund logo – your Citadel reference. I’m not sure you want engagement there anyway. It feels lazy to me. One shouldn’t pay attention to the logos of money managers. The name and logo of most funds are formulaic and that’s the intended aesthetic. Let the results speak for themselves. If you’re asking about the logo, you’re outside the conversation. Citadel and Ken Griffin are interesting figures from a business model innovation point of view – they really stand for that idea of not having the hubris to think any one strategy can reliably pick winners. But since I know this work is looping back to your Philip K. Dick interest, I’ll submit that Dick would see that logo as the insignia of his “black iron prison.” Its mute inaccessibility would of course be taken as further confirmation of his paranoid vision: the worst is always yet to come. The paranoid style in management does have a time and a place, Gardar, I’ll grant you that.

****

I’m always amazed by how much time you spend in the bathtub. I make that statement because there are a few pieces here that foreground this physical labor theme, with some interesting slippage between values (moral, universal) and value (economic, subjective). The now deprecated labor theory of value brings me back to the story, in which Milton Friedman visits a construction site in China and the punchline is: “Why don’t you just have them use spoons?”

I’m guessing these works are meant to stand in for an argument that goes something like: artistic creation is an example of unalienated labor, of neither productive nor unproductive activity. For me, your art and bathtub are superimposed as autonomous exceptions to the regimes of discipline, labor and instrumental reason. But I know you couldn’t do something so earnest, and I think you’ve read Boltanski, so I’m pretty sure I have it wrong.
Side note: I would probably advocate making work that is perhaps less art referential – my fear is that you risk serving an ever-decreasing audience, and there’s just no flywheel there for your business, not to mention your level of ambition.
But, finally, Gardar, who am I to opine like this so freely? Let’s at least be accurate: I tried my hand at doing what you do, failed, and pivoted into the everyday working world. So, we should take that into account. But can we agree on something before I leave? I believe that the most important thing for art right now is for artists to make better long-term cost-benefit decisions, and for us to create exit ramps for artists who want to leave the potentially internal exploitative dynamics of the art world to find rewarding careers outside of it. Where are you on that?

-- Jason Kakoyiannis