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Halvor Rønning and Nikhil Vettukattil at Felix Gaudlitz

June 25, 2023

Artists: Halvor Rønning and Nikhil Vettukattil

Exhibition title: Contaminators

Venue: Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna, Austria

Date: May 6 – June 17, 2023

Photography: kunst-dokumentation.com / Courtesy the artists and FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna

A condition for contamination is a hole, a break, a structural breach. The pressure reaches a limit, a push or a pull too far that strains the system to the point of potential collapse, causing it to spill over.

Two series of works, each systems of containment, carefully calibrated to one another allowing for a willful disruption of conditions. The materials work to stabilise each other without closure, a dialectic of mutual implication and cross contamination.

The series Circulation refers to the technology of “fluidics”–the use of fluids to carry out analogue or digital functions conventionally performed by electronics. The fluids in this case are mineral oil and fake blood used in film, two unmixable liquids that function as a binary of 0 and 1, and have the potential for the completion of mathematical operations, yet in the absence of logic gates. The works both resemble and are made from components used for conventional infrastructure within built environments for the supply or removal of electricity, gas, sewage, water, heat, light (data), and so on. Such a flow in this case is made perceptible in response to the parameters of the space.

The seven paintings are remnants of a fluid system of their own–with broken lines and dry pools of diluted paint. An efficient starting point for the process: pages cut out from magazines, scanned and printed directly on the canvas shortcuts a beginning. Unlike in the photographic images, the painted surface is an unstable active construction of planes for vision. Here forms arrive at definition through a feedback loop. They are frozen images of partial blindness, an asymmetrical form, just and proper.

Adding textures, lines and surface planes, in a play between grit and smoothness, transparency and opacity, invitation and hesitation; an itch.

Halvor Rønning and Nikhil Vettukattil, Contaminators, 2023, exhibition view, Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna

Halvor Rønning, Untitled, 2023, Acrylic and soft pastels on canvas, 180 × 130 cm (70.866 × 51.181 in)

Halvor Rønning and Nikhil Vettukattil, Contaminators, 2023, exhibition view, Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna

Nikhil Vettukattil, Circulation (fluidics 0 gate V), 2023, Peristaltic pump, food grade silicone tubing, Grimas Film Blood B, mineral oil, vacuum formed plastic, electrical components, Dimenisons variable

Halvor Rønning and Nikhil Vettukattil, Contaminators, 2023, exhibition view, Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna

Nikhil Vettukattil, Circulation (fluidics 0 gate III), 2023, Peristaltic pump, food grade silicone tubing, Grimas Film Blood B, mineral oil, vacuum formed plastic, electrical components, Dimenisons variable

Halvor Rønning and Nikhil Vettukattil, Contaminators, 2023, exhibition view, Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna

Halvor Rønning, Untitled, 2023, UV print and acrylic on canvas, 119 × 84 cm (46.850 × 33.071 in)

Halvor Rønning, Untitled, 2023, Acrylic and soft pastels on canvas, 119 × 84 cm (46.850 × 33.071 in)

Halvor Rønning and Nikhil Vettukattil, Contaminators, 2023, exhibition view, Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna

Halvor Rønning, Best Buns, 2023, UV print, acrylic and soft pastels on canvas 119 × 84 cm (46.850 × 33.071 in)

Nikhil Vettukattil, Circulation (fluidics 0 gate IV), 2023, Peristaltic pump, food grade silicone tubing, Grimas Film Blood B, mineral oil, vacuum formed plastic, electrical components, Dimensions variable