Artist: Henrik Olai Kaarstein
Exhibition title: This has nothing to do with this or same as it never was
Venue: Warm São Paulo, Brazil
Date: February 27 – March 28, 2015
Photography: Images courtesy of the artist and Warm São Paulo, Brazil
Warm São Paulo is pleased to present This has nothing to do with this or same as it never was, the first solo show of Henrik Olai Kaarstein’s (1989, Oslo) in Brazil.
With a title that recalls deliberately the idea of an imperfect similarity, an improper comparison, a disconnected connection, this show puts all its strength on idea that the similarity is not a lack of equality, but a complex search of uniqueness.
Henrik’s similarity arises from the ability to undo the past after having been inspired from it, creating a new present of a simple complex diversity, bringing out the utopia of “right here, right now”, thinking that cancel and re-found is a way to live the experience of the progress.
Praising the arrogance of being single, one and only, of denying the past after trowing away the superfluous and useless, up to resemble it, but without being the same, because, in any case, you should always «lead and not be led».
Henrik’s work, cancel and resets the value, the aesthetics and the original finality of found objects and use them as surfaces or supports for his production.
Though the manipulation of textiles, paper, and wood with a range of transformation agents, his work moves through the core of painting, and the possibilities of forge and create new and different views of usual, changing radically the prospective of the commonplace.
The limits of familiarity and intimacy go off and project ourselves toward a new aesthetic, canceling the functionality of ordinary objects and changing their most deep, private or sexual connotations.
The heated tone of the colors or industrial chemicals used in the process, catalyze the viewer’s eyes, leaving the aesthetic value and pictorial as last result. An enveloping result, halfway between concrete and fade, bending and changing the materiality of objects, or, as in D, a collaborative gesture between Henrik Olai Kaarstein and Julian Tromp (1993, Vienna), which merges with a music that play with the element of fade, creating a harmony that unites and totals the work.
Henrik Olai Kaarstein creates works finished in it’s shallowness, understanding the surface, not as lack of complexity, which indeed is soaked by the simplicity of thinking that the paint does not need to be justified.
Henrik lives and works in Oslo and Frankfurt , where he is graduating from the Städelschule later this year. He is represented by T293 Gallery, Rome/ Naples.
