Easy.
For a while now I have worked with the synthetic material PVC as canvas for paintings.
You know this material from large advertisement banners on the side of buildings or from the front lawn of gas stations with two hot dogs for one printed on them. This is the first time I have used PVC banners as blank canvas (previously I had printed images or text on them before painting on top of that). They are also much smaller than before. It has something to do with the plasticity of it. Why I like it so. It looks a little like paper, and therefore the paintings looks a little like drawings, fake drawings, especially in this smaller scale. And yet the paint is very much there. It sticks well. Although the acrylic of the paint and the plasticity of the surface are almost too alike; the smoothly rippled surface of the PVC both repel and embrace the wet paint, sometimes leaving pixelated-like areas in the thin paint as the oil in the plastic rejects it a little.
(NB: they are abstract paintings, painted with GOLDEN Artist Colors - the king of acrylic paint.)
The sculptures that constitute the spacial part of this exhibition are all suggestions for future bronze sculptures (or titanium, aluminum or a yet undiscovered material for that matter, why not?). They all sit on a shelf that connects the four concrete pillars in the middle of the exhibition space. Paintings on the wall. Sculptures on the shelf. Easy.
It is always the idea or expectation of the thing, the promise that is the most exciting. As the rest of the world I am excited about the promise of 3D printing. How soon can we print our pizza? How soon can we print my sculpture please?
These are prototypes, and sculptures in their own right. They are made in various materials such as self-hardening modeling clay, MDF, roofing material, foam board, plants, hair, salt dough, oasis and objects from the studio. And styrofoam. And pasta di legno. Some of them are digital models made in a 3D computer program.
They will become bronzes ; true indisputable art objects built to last through the apocalypse, the singularity and beyond. In my mind's eye I picture them in a once flooded and again dried out forgotten storage facility in a far off future, patinated beyond recognition by the elements, man and time. They last. Discovered by aliens re-visiting Earth in an even more distant future. The visitors shaking their heads in amazement at how ugly and pointless most of the art from the human art movement known as Contemporary Art (1960 - 2020's) really was. They do scan it though.
The bronzes lasts. Easy. Until melted into something else that is, by overflowing magma from Earths core or more deliberately by a future incarnation or clone of myself. Or it is blasted into bronze fairy dust in a nuclear mega-second long before that. And then IT won't matter much. But this is how greedy this sculptor is. No more than most. I want to want to.
I am sitting in the exhibition space. In Henningsen Gallery. It is a week before the opening of the show and I am writing what you are reading. As I am sitting here I can´t be sure if it is night or day outside. In the basement space of Henningsen Gallery there are no windows and no natural light entering anywhere. (If you are reading this from a piece of paper in the space and not online you know what I mean.) Only the clock in the top of my computer screen can tell me the time of day, or night. It is day now, 12.22 PM. But could just as well be 00.22 AM. The battery of my laptop is at 53%. There are 4 bars of internet; maximum connection (Henningsen Guest, code: 123456789). There is an inactive grey Time Machine icon next to it. Bluetooth is on, although I never use it for anything. I sometimes use a mouse though, instead of the touchpad, better for my arm and shoulder I think, but it is USB connected.
In a certain sense this out-of-time feeling is also relevant to the sculptures and paintings of which this show consist. They look like real abstract paintings and sculptures. And they are. Easy. We have seen something similar before. We are relatively safe here (…xxxxxx…). There is a comfort in the abstract, a beauty and a positive when things just do not add up, defiant to the laws of mathematics*.
Concrete abstraction. Paradoxically enough. Cheers,
- Rasmus
* (okay, deeeep deep down of course it probably all does add up. But we can't know for sure yet)
Rasmus Høj Mygind, Henningsen Gallery, Copenhagen
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