Studio, a solo exhibition at Ribordy Contemporary, opens January 19th, 2012.

ERIK LINDMAN ‘Studio’
Press Release
Cut, paste, staple, tear, reassemble: it is around the act and process that Erik Lindman’s works are elaborated. Working with existing elements – waste, objects of the studio, pieces of works abandoned – all signs of the creative act, he uses the defects of the canvas and “failures” as a spring of its creativity. These paintings include an important part of historical abstraction, of which they are freed and that they replay in a complete freedom.

“I find things: work surfaces in particular, discarded by other artists, construction workers, or bums, and make these objects hang like paintings.
The objects that end up being carried back to the studio lack physical dimension: they become surfaces, image. On these walks I’m not interested in validating garbage as art or in regurgitating Marxist platitudes about high and low culture. The particular surfaces used are those that engage, though their specific material iteration, in the aesthetic historical tradition of drawing and painting. It is my taste that is foregrounded, as well as a dedication to the absurd efficiency of art.

This taste articulates an understanding of beauty that originates in the Anonymous. I could not create these surfaces or incidents, but can articulate their impersonal beauty as this beauty comes in contact with my personality. Simone Weil best describes what is at stake in her essay Human Personality (1943):

The human being can only escape from the collective by raising himself above the personal and entering into the impersonal. The moment he does this, there is something in him, a small portion of his soul, upon which nothing of the collective can get a hold. If he can root himself in the impersonal good so as to be able to draw energy from it, then he is in a condition, wherever he feels the obligation to do so, to bring to bear without any outside help, against any collectivity, a small but real force.

The labor is in editing. It is not the creation of a journey, the validation of the artist, or the love of things fallen out of the Zeugganzes (ndlr: Heideggerian notion meaning a coherent and useful tool system). I believe these to be proper paintings and do not care if the viewer chooses to see art in everything. A painting made of shit or gold, or shit or gold itself, can no longer not be part of the everyday.”
Erik Lindman – December 2011