We are delighted to present Erik Lindman’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Over the past six months, the artist has developed a new series of both large and small scale paintings to occupy both floors of the gallery.
From the aesthetics (as well as politics) of waste, Lindman explores abstract painting and its position within contemporary art. Discarded elements retrieved by the artists are physically integrated into these paintings. These surfaces become a reflection on the act and idea of painting. In this way, scratched Perspex, stained leather or protective surfaces are used as a starting point – or a motif – for abstract compositions. In this new body of work, the materiality of paint becomes increasingly present eo ipso. Paint mirrors, and yet parodies, the waning tangibility of these obsolete quotidian elements in an increasingly virtual world.
While giving a generous place to chance and accident in the creative process, Lindman is also interested in the notion of failure and editing. Sections of canvas from unsuccessful paintings are given new life, as in works like in ‘Harlequin’ and ‘Harlequin 2’, where a former painting is literally split and made into two new original works.
In Lindman’s paintings, one can often observe empty surfaces, shaped by the removal of cut canvas or other material. Empty or blank or silent, these surfaces can be seen as blurry screens or as spaces for projection. Key to these paintings, this tone was clearly articulated by Aoife Rosenmeyer in a recent review:
“When Maurice Blanchot wrote The Death of the Last Writer in 1955, he could not have foreseen our information-flooded age, yet he already identified the author as a figure that ‘imposes silence on this speaking’ – the speaking being the insistent, vain noise of the void around us. That speaking has since become a cacophony: we need authors and artists to tickle, torment and subdue it more than ever, and Lindman demonstrates this … [in an] orchestrated moment of stillness.”
Aoife Rosenmeyer, A Grammar of the Accidental, frieze d/e, n°153 March 2013
Exhibition from September 12 to November 2, 2013
Opening on September 12, 6-9pm, in presence of the artist, at the occasion of the Nuit des Bains
ribordy contemporary
7b boulevard d’Yvoy, CH-1205 Geneva T +41 (0)22 321 75 63
www.ribordycontemporary.com
