Gardar Eide Einarsson’s recent gouaches on paper transform fragments of closed-captioning text from film and television into stark, text-based compositions. Disembodied phrases – once cues for sound, gesture, or music – are set against black backgrounds, becoming carriers of mood and psychological tension. Stripped of their original context, they hover between the poetic and the foreboding, inviting the viewer to confront the tension between visibility and absence, narrative and silence.

At the centre of Einarsson’s practice is a critical inquiry into systems of control, identity, and perception. By using closed-captioning, designed to translate sound into visual information, he prompts reflection on how meaning is constructed in the absence of clarity. This results in a charged stillness that challenges our reliance on mediated narratives to understand the world.