Matias Faldbakken, Beaten Ink, Upset Brick, Downcast Charcoal (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel
Marking his first solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, artist Matias Faldbakken brings together a series of installations that unify drawings from 2017 to 2021 alongside a series of various groups of lacquered bricks, some locally sourced, others originating from Norway. The artist, who has often explored notions of antagonism and conflict, charging his works with a sort of disruptive, confrontational energy, here turns that notion towards the act of drawing itself.
Matias Faldbakken, Beaten Ink, Upset Brick, Downcast Charcoal (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel
Faldbakken’s works hold in perpetual tension the forces of proposition and cancellation, aesthetic generosity and conceptual restraint, the possibility of language and its dissolution into illegibility. To Faldbakken, the act of drawing is a confrontation in its own right. “A drawing doesn’t allow you to bluff,” he says. “Drawing is the most basic meeting between idea, execution and looks. Whatever you ask a drawing to do pictorially will never be answered.” This sense of the connections between hand and paper, representation and idea, here is embellished by the practical and disposable nature of its execution; rendered nearly anywhere, composed with simple materials, and welcome to meandering, doodling and willful subversion of pictorial logic. With the artist’s drawings, there’s little sense of cohesion here, giving oneself over to free-associative embellishments of text, quick sketches of classical antiquity, and even swirling abstractions.
Matias Faldbakken, Beaten Ink, Upset Brick, Downcast Charcoal (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel
A consistent characteristic of his work is a movement towards abstraction through a variety of materials often used in construction or logistics, like garbage bags and flattened cardboard boxes, tiled walls, concrete objects or, more recently, brick sculptures. Here, that continues with a series of colorful brick stacks, a brusque, direct contrast to the often obtuse nature of the artist’s drawings. Allowing these two structural systems to co-exist, Faldbakken’s work challenges the viewer to both construct narratives around his works, and always be ready to abandon them.
The show closes February 5th.
Matias Faldbakken, Beaten Ink, Upset Brick, Downcast Charcoal (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Matias Faldbakken at Chantal Crousel [Exhibition Site]
